Assessing and comparing Hadoop for Business Intelligence Design considerations

Hadoop is a great tool to be part of a BI solution. It is not, itself, a BI solution. What Hadoop does is takes in Data_A and outputs Data_B. Whatever is needed for Bi but is not in a useful form can be processed using MapReduce and output a useful form of the data. Be it CSV, HIVE, HBase, MSSQL or anything else used to view data.

I believe Hadoop is supposed to be the ETL tool. That's what we are using it for. We process gigs of log files every hour and store it in Hive and do daily aggregations that are loading into a MSSQL server and viewed through a visualization layer.

The major design considerations I've run against are:
- Data Flexibility: Do you want your users to view pre-aggregated data or have the flexibility to adjust the query and look at the data how they want
- Speed: How long do you want your users to wait for the data? Hive (for example) is slow. It takes minutes to generate results, even on fairly small data sets. The larger the data traversed the longer it will take to generate a result.
- Visualization: What type of visualization do you want to use? Do you want to custom build a lot of pieces or be able to use something off the shelf? What restraints and flexibility are needed for your visualization? How flexible and changeable does the visualization need to be?

hth

Update: As a response to @Bhat's comment asking about lack of visualization...
The lack of a visualization tool that would allow us to effectively utilize the data stored in HBase was a major factor in re-evaluating our solution. We stored the raw data in Hive, and pre-aggregated the data and stored it HBase. To utilize this we were going to have to write a custom connector (did this part) and visualization layer. We looked at what we would be able to produce and what is commercially available, and went the commercial route.
We still use Hadoop as our ETL tool for processing our weblogs, it's fantastic for that. We just send the ETL'd raw data to a commercial big data database that will take the place of both Hive and HBase in our design.

Hadoop doesn't really compare to MSSQL or other data warehouse storage. Hadoop doesn't do any storage (ignoring the HDFS), it does processing of data. Running MapReduces (which Hive does) is going to be slower than MSSQL (or such).

Hadoop is very well suited for storing colossal files that can represent fact tables. These tables can be partitioned by placing individual files representing the table into separate directories. Hive understands such file structures and allows to query them like partitioned tables. You can phrase your BI questions to the Hadoop data in the form of SQL queries via Hive, but you will still need to write and run an occasional MapReduce job.

From business perspective, you should consider Hadoop if you have a lot of low-value data. There are many cases when RDBMS / MPP solutions are not cost effective. You also should consider Hadoop as a serious option if your data is not structured (HTMLs for example).