Hadoop Interview Questions I PDF

Hadoop Interview Questions
1. What is BIG DATA?
Big Data is nothing but an assortment of such a huge and complex data that it becomes very tedious
to capture, store, process, retrieve and analyse it with the help of on-hand database management
tools or traditional data processing techniques.
2. Can you give some examples of Big Data?
There are many real life examples of Big Data! Facebook is generating 500+ terabytes of data per
day, NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) generates about 1 terabyte of new trade data per day, a jet
airline collects 10 terabytes of censor data for every 30 minutes of flying time. All these are day to
day examples of Big Data!
3. Can you give a detailed overview about the Big Data being generated by Facebook?
As of December 31, 2012, there are 1.06 billion monthly active users on Facebook and 680 million
mobile users. On an average, 3.2 billion likes and comments are posted every day on Facebook. 72%
of web audience is on Facebook. And why not! There are so many activities going on Facebook from
wall posts, sharing images, videos, writing comments and liking posts, etc. In fact, Facebook started
using Hadoop in mid-2009 and was one of the initial users of Hadoop.
4. According to IBM, what are the three characteristics of Big Data?
According to IBM, the three characteristics of Big Data are:
Volume: Facebook generating 500+ terabytes of data per day.
Velocity: Analyzing 2 million records each day to identify the reason for losses.
Variety: images, audio, video, sensor data, log files, etc.
5. How big is ‘Big Data’?
With time, data volume is growing exponentially. Earlier we used to talk about Megabytes or
Gigabytes. But time has arrived when we talk about data volume in terms of terabytes, petabytes
and also zeta bytes! Global data volume was around 1.8ZB in 2011 and is expected to be 7.9ZB in
2015. It is also known that the global information doubles in every two years!
6. How analysis of Big Data is useful for organizations?
Effective analysis of Big Data provides a lot of business advantage as organizations will learn which
areas to focus on and which areas are less important. Big data analysis provides some early key
indicators that can prevent the company from a huge loss or help in grasping a great opportunity
with open hands! A precise analysis of Big Data helps in decision making! For instance, nowadays
people rely so much on Facebook and Twitter before buying any product or service. All thanks to the
Big Data explosion.
Hadoop Interview QuestionsPage 1

7. Who are ‘Data Scientists’?
Data scientists are soon replacing business analysts or data analysts. Data scientists are experts who
find solutions to analyze data. Just as web analysis, we have data scientists who have good business
insight as to how to handle a business challenge. Sharp data scientists are not only involved in
dealing business problems, but also choosing the relevant issues that can bring value-addition to the
organization.
8. What is Hadoop?
Hadoop is a framework that allows for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of
commodity computers using a simple programming model.
9. Why the name ‘Hadoop’?
Hadoop doesn’t have any expanding version like ‘oops’. The charming yellow elephant you see is
basically named after Doug’s son’s toy elephant!
10. Why do we need Hadoop?
Everyday a large amount of unstructured data is getting dumped into our machines. The major
challenge is not to store large data sets in our systems but to retrieve and analyze the big data in the
organizations that too data present in different machines at different locations. In this situation a
necessity for Hadoop arises. Hadoop has the ability to analyze the data present in different machines
at different locations very quickly and in a very cost effective way. It uses the concept of MapReduce
which enables it to divide the query into small parts and process them in parallel. This is also known
as parallel computing.
11. What are some of the characteristics of Hadoop framework?
Hadoop framework is written in Java. It is designed to solve problems that involve analyzing large
data (e.g. petabytes). The programming model is based on Google’s MapReduce. The infrastructure
is based on Google’s Big Data and Distributed File System. Hadoop handles large files/data
throughput and supports data intensive distributed applications. Hadoop is scalable as more nodes
can be easily added to it.
12. Give a brief overview of Hadoop history?
In 2002, Doug Cutting created an open source, web crawler project.
In 2004, Google published MapReduce, GFS papers.
In 2006, Doug Cutting developed the open source, Mapreduce and HDFS project.
In 2008, Yahoo ran 4,000 node Hadoop cluster and Hadoop won terabyte sort benchmark.
In 2009, Facebook launched SQL support for Hadoop.
13. Give examples of some companies that are using Hadoop structure?

A lot of companies are using the Hadoop structure such as Cloudera, EMC, MapR, Hortonworks,
Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Google and so on.
14. What is the basic difference between traditional RDBMS and Hadoop?
Traditional RDBMS is used for transactional systems to report and archive the data, whereas Hadoop
is an approach to store huge amount of data in the distributed file system and process it. RDBMS will
be useful when you want to seek one record from Big data, whereas, Hadoop will be useful when
you want Big data in one shot and perform analysis on that later.
15. What is structured and unstructured data?
Structured data is the data that is easily identifiable as it is organized in a structure. The most
common form of structured data is a database where specific information is stored in tables, that is,
rows and columns. Unstructured data refers to any data that cannot be identified easily. It could be
in the form of images, videos, documents, email, logs and random text. It is not in the form of rows
and columns.
16. What are the core components of Hadoop?
Core components of Hadoop are HDFS and MapReduce. HDFS is basically used to store large data
sets and MapReduce is used to process such large data sets.
17. What is HDFS?
HDFS is a file system designed for storing very large files with streaming data access patterns,
running clusters on commodity hardware.
18. What are the key features of HDFS?
HDFS is highly fault-tolerant, with high throughput, suitable for applications with large data sets,
streaming access to file system data and can be built out of commodity hardware.
19. What is Fault Tolerance?
Suppose you have a file stored in a system, and due to some technical problem that file gets
destroyed. Then there is no chance of getting the data back present in that file. To avoid such
situations, Hadoop has introduced the feature of fault tolerance in HDFS. In Hadoop, when we store
a file, it automatically gets replicated at two other locations also. So even if one or two of the
systems collapse, the file is still available on the third system.
20. Replication causes data redundancy then why is pursued in HDFS?
HDFS works with commodity hardware (systems with average configurations) that has high chances
of getting crashed any time. Thus, to make the entire system highly fault-tolerant, HDFS replicates
and stores data in different places. Any data on HDFS gets stored at atleast 3 different locations. So,
even if one of them is corrupted and the other is unavailable for some time for any reason, then data
can be accessed from the third one. Hence, there is no chance of losing the data. This replication
factor helps us to attain the feature of Hadoop called Fault Tolerant.
21. Since the data is replicated thrice in HDFS, does it mean that any calculation done on one node will
also be replicated on the other two?

Since there are 3 nodes, when we send the MapReduce programs, calculations will be done only on
the original data. The master node will know which node exactly has that particular data. In case, if
one of the nodes is not responding, it is assumed to be failed. Only then, the required calculation will
be done on the second replica.
22. What is throughput? How does HDFS get a good throughput?
Throughput is the amount of work done in a unit time. It describes how fast the data is getting
accessed from the system and it is usually used to measure performance of the system. In HDFS,
when we want to perform a task or an action, then the work is divided and shared among different
systems. So all the systems will be executing the tasks assigned to them independently and in
parallel. So the work will be completed in a very short period of time. In this way, the HDFS gives
good throughput. By reading data in parallel, we decrease the actual time to read data
tremendously.
23. What is streaming access?
As HDFS works on the principle of ‘Write Once, Read Many‘, the feature of streaming access is
extremely important in HDFS. HDFS focuses not so much on storing the data but how to retrieve it at
the fastest possible speed, especially while analyzing logs. In HDFS, reading the complete data is
more important than the time taken to fetch a single record from the data.
24. What is commodity hardware? Does commodity hardware include RAM?
Commodity hardware is a non-expensive system which is not of high quality or high-availability.

Hadoop can be installed in any average commodity hardware. We don’t need super computers or
high-end hardware to work on Hadoop. Yes, Commodity hardware includes RAM because there will
be some services which will be running on RAM.
25. What is a Name Node (NN)?
Name Node (NN) is the master node on which job tracker runs and consists of the metadata. It
maintains and manages the blocks which are present on the data nodes. It is a high-availability
machine and single point of failure in HDFS.
26. Is Name Node (NN) also a commodity?
No. Name Node (NN) can never be commodity hardware because the entire HDFS rely on it. It is the
single point of failure in HDFS. Name Node (NN) has to be a high-availability machine.
27. What is a metadata?
Metadata is the information about the data stored in data nodes such as location of the file, size of
the file and so on.
28. What is a Data node?
Data nodes are the slaves which are deployed on each machine and provide the actual storage.
These are responsible for serving read and write requests for the clients.
29. Why do we use HDFS for applications having large data sets and not when there are lot of small
files?

HDFS is more suitable for large amount of data sets in a single file as compared to small amount of
data spread across multiple files. This is because Name Node (NN) is a very expensive high
performance system, so it is not prudent to occupy the space in the Name Node (NN) by
unnecessary amount of metadata that is generated for multiple small files. So, when there is a large
amount of data in a single file, name node will occupy less space. Hence for getting optimized
performance, HDFS supports large data sets instead of multiple small files.
30. What is a daemon?
Daemon is a process or service that runs in background. In general, we use this word in UNIX
environment. The equivalent of Daemon in Windows is “services” and in Dos is ” TSR”.
31. What is a job tracker?
Job tracker is a daemon that runs on a Name Node (NN) for submitting and tracking MapReduce jobs
in Hadoop. It assigns the tasks to the different task tracker. In a Hadoop cluster, there will be only
one job tracker but many task trackers. It is the single point of failure for Hadoop and MapReduce
Service. If the job tracker goes down all the running jobs are halted. It receives heartbeat from task
tracker based on which Job tracker decides whether the assigned task is completed or not.
32. What is a task tracker?
Task tracker is also a daemon that runs on data nodes. Task Trackers manage the execution of
individual tasks on slave node. When a client submits a job, the job tracker will initialize the job and
divide the work and assign them to different task trackers to perform MapReduce tasks. While
performing this action, the task tracker will be simultaneously communicating with job tracker by
sending heartbeat. If the job tracker does not receive heartbeat from task tracker within specified
time, then it will assume that task tracker has crashed and assign that task to another task tracker in
the cluster.
33. Is Name Node (NN) machine same as data node machine as in terms of hardware?
It depends upon the cluster you are trying to create. The Hadoop VM can be there on the same
machine or on another machine. For instance, in a single node cluster, there is only one machine,
whereas in the development or in a testing environment, Name Node (NN) and data nodes are on
different machines.
34. What is a heartbeat in HDFS?
A heartbeat is a signal indicating that it is alive. A data node sends heartbeat to Name Node (NN) and
task tracker will send its heart beat to job tracker. If the Name Node (NN) or job tracker does not
receive heart beat then they will decide that there is some problem in data node or task tracker is
unable to perform the assigned task.
35. Are Name Node (NN) and job tracker on the same host?
No, in practical environment, Name Node (NN) is on a separate host and job tracker is on a separate
host.
36. What is a ‘block’ in HDFS?
A ‘block’ is the minimum amount of data that can be read or written. In HDFS, the default block size
is 64 MB as contrast to the block size of 8192 bytes in Unix/Linux. Files in HDFS are broken down into
block-sized chunks, which are stored as independent units. HDFS blocks are large as compared to
disk blocks; particularly to minimize the cost of seeks.
37. If a particular file is 50 MB, will the HDFS block still consume 64 MB as the default size?
No, not at all! 64 MB is just a unit where the data will be stored. In this particular situation, only 50
MB will be consumed by an HDFS block and 14 MB will be free to store something else. It is the
Master Node that does data allocation in an efficient manner.
38. What are the benefits of block transfer?
A file can be larger than any single disk in the network. There’s nothing that requires the blocks from
a file to be stored on the same disk, so they can take advantage of any of the disks in the cluster.
Making the unit of abstraction a block rather than a file simplifies the storage subsystem. Blocks
provide fault tolerance and availability. To insure against corrupted blocks and disk and machine
failure, each block is replicated to a small number of physically separate machines (typically three). If
a block becomes unavailable, a copy can be read from another location in a way that is transparent
to the client.
39. If we want to copy 10 blocks from one machine to another, but another machine can copy only 8.5
blocks, can the blocks be broken at the time of replication?
In HDFS, blocks cannot be broken down. Before copying the blocks from one machine to another,
the Master node will figure out what is the actual amount of space required, how many block are
being used, how much space is available, and it will allocate the blocks accordingly.
40. How indexing is done in HDFS?
Hadoop has its own way of indexing. Depending upon the block size, once the data is stored, HDFS
will keep on storing the last part of the data which will say where the next part of the data will be. In
fact, this is the base of HDFS.
41. If a data Node is full how it’s identified?
When data is stored in data node, then the metadata of that data will be stored in the Name Node
(NN). So Name Node (NN) will identify if the data node is full.
42. If data nodes increase, then do we need to upgrade Name Node (NN)?
While installing the Hadoop system, Name Node (NN) is determined based on the size of the
clusters. Most of the time, we do not need to upgrade the Name Node (NN) because it does not
store the actual data, but just the metadata, so such a requirement rarely arise.
43. Is job tracker and task trackers present in separate machines?
Yes, job tracker and task tracker are present in different machines. The reason is job tracker is a
single point of failure for the Hadoop MapReduce service. If it goes down, all running jobs are halted.
44. When we send a data to a node, do we allow settling in time, before sending another data to that
node?
Yes, we do.

45. Does Hadoop always require digital data to process?
Yes. Hadoop always require digital data to be processed.
46. On what basis Name Node (NN) will decide which data node to write on?
As the Name Node (NN) has the metadata (information) related to all the data nodes, it knows which
data node is free.
47. Doesn’t Google have its very own version of DFS?
Yes, Google owns a DFS known as “Google File System (GFS)” developed by Google Inc. for its own
use.
48. Who is a ‘user’ in HDFS?
A user is like you or me, who has some query or who needs some kind of data.
49. Is client the end user in HDFS?
No, Client is an application which runs on your machine, which is used to interact with the Name
Node (NN) (job tracker) or data node (task tracker).
50. What is the communication channel between client and Name Node (NN)/data node?
The mode of communication is SSH.
51. What is a rack?
Rack is a storage area with all the data nodes put together. These data nodes can be physically
located at different places. Rack is a physical collection of data nodes which are stored at a single
location. There can be multiple racks in a single location.
52. On what basis data will be stored on a rack?
When the client is ready to load a file into the cluster, the content of the file will be divided into
blocks. Now the client consults the Name Node (NN) and gets 3 data nodes for every block of the file
which indicates where the block should be stored. While placing the data nodes, the key rule
followed is “for every block of data, two copies will exist in one rack, third copy in a different rack“.
This rule is known as “Replica Placement Policy“.
53. Do we need to place 2nd and 3rd data in rack 2 only?
Yes, this is to avoid data node failure.
54. What if rack 2 and data node fails?
If both rack2 and data node present in rack 1 fails then there is no chance of getting data from it. In
order to avoid such situations, we need to replicate that data more number of times instead of
replicating only thrice. This can be done by changing the value in replication factor which is set to 3
by default.

55. What is a Secondary Name Node (NN)? Is it a substitute to the Name Node (NN)?
The secondary Name Node (NN) constantly reads the data from the RAM of the Name Node (NN)
and writes it into the hard disk or the file system. It is not a substitute to the Name Node (NN), so if
the Name Node (NN) fails, the entire Hadoop system goes down.
56. What is the difference between Gen1 and Gen2 Hadoop with regards to the Name Node (NN)?
In Gen 1 Hadoop, Name Node (NN) is the single point of failure. In Gen 2 Hadoop, we have what is
known as Active and Passive Name Node (NN)s kind of a structure. If the active Name Node (NN)
fails, passive Name Node (NN) takes over the charge.
57. What is MapReduce?
Map Reduce is the heart of Hadoop that consists of two parts – ‘map’ and ‘reduce’. Maps and
reduces are programs for processing data. ‘Map’ processes the data first to give some intermediate
output which is further processed by ‘Reduce’ to generate the final output. Thus, MapReduce allows
for distributed processing of the map and reduction operations.
58. Can you explain how do ‘map’ and ‘reduce’ work?
Name Node (NN) takes the input and divide it into parts and assign them to data nodes. These data
nodes process the tasks assigned to them and make a key-value pair and returns the intermediate
output to the Reducer. The reducer collects this key value pairs of all the data nodes and combines
them and generates the final output.
59. What is ‘Key value pair’ in HDFS?
Key value pair is the intermediate data generated by maps and sent to reduces for generating the
final output.
60. What is the difference between MapReduce engine and HDFS cluster?
HDFS cluster is the name given to the whole configuration of master and slaves where data is stored.
Map Reduce Engine is the programming module which is used to retrieve and analyze data.
61. Is map like a pointer?
No, Map is not like a pointer.
62. Do we require two servers for the Name Node (NN) and the data nodes?
Yes, we need two different servers for the Name Node (NN) and the data nodes. This is because
Name Node (NN) requires highly configurable system as it stores information about the location
details of all the files stored in different data nodes and on the other hand, data nodes require low
configuration system.
63. Why the number of splits equal to the number of maps?
The number of maps is equal to the number of input splits because we want the key and value pairs
of all the input splits.

64. Is a job split into maps?
No, a job is not split into maps. Spilt is created for the file. The file is placed on data nodes in blocks.
For each split, a map is needed.
65. Which are the two types of ‘writes’ in HDFS?
There are two types of writes in HDFS: posted and non-posted write. Posted Write is when we write
it and forget about it, without worrying about the acknowledgement. It is similar to our traditional
Indian post. In a Non-posted Write, we wait for the acknowledgement. It is similar to the today’s
courier services. Naturally, non-posted write is more expensive than the posted write. It is much
more expensive, though both writes are asynchronous.
66. Why Reading is done in parallel and Writing is not in HDFS?
Reading is done in parallel because by doing so we can access the data fast. But we do not perform
the write operation in parallel. The reason is that if we perform the write operation in parallel, then
it might result in data inconsistency. For example, you have a file and two nodes are trying to write
data into the file in parallel, then the first node does not know what the second node has written
and vice-versa. So, this makes it confusing which data to be stored and accessed.
67. Can Hadoop be compared to NOSQL database like Cassandra?
Though NOSQL is the closet technology that can be compared to Hadoop, it has its own pros and
cons. There is no DFS in NOSQL. Hadoop is not a database. It’s a file system (HDFS) and distributed
programming framework (MapReduce).
68. Which are the three modes in which Hadoop can be run?
The three modes in which Hadoop can be run are:

1. Standalone (local) mode
2. Pseudo-distributed mode
3. Fully distributed mode
69. What are the features of standalone (local) mode?
In stand-alone mode there are no daemons, everything runs on a single JVM. It has no DFS and
utilizes the local file system. Stand-alone mode is suitable only for running MapReduce programs
during development. It is one of the most least used environments.
70. What are the features of Pseudo mode?
Pseudo mode is used both for development and in the QA environment. In the Pseudo mode all the
daemons run on the same machine.
71. Can we call VMs as pseudo?
No, VMs are not pseudo because VM is something different and pseudo is very specific to Hadoop.
72. What are the features of Fully Distributed mode?
Fully Distributed mode is used in the production environment, where we have ‘n’ number of
machines forming a Hadoop cluster. Hadoop daemons run on a cluster of machines. There is one

host onto which Name Node (NN) is running and another host on which data node is running and
then there are machines on which task tracker is running. We have separate masters and separate
slaves in this distribution.
73. Does Hadoop follow the UNIX pattern?
Yes, Hadoop closely follows the UNIX pattern. Hadoop also has the “conf” directory as in the case of
UNIX.
74. In which directory Hadoop is installed?
Cloudera and Apache has the same directory structure. Hadoop is installed in cd
/usr/lib/Hadoop-0.20/.
75. What are the port numbers of Name Node (NN), job tracker and task tracker?
The port number for Name Node (NN) is ’70′, for job tracker is ’30′ and for task tracker is ’60′.
76. What is the Hadoop-core configuration?
Hadoop core is configured by two xml files:
1. Hadoop-default.xml which was renamed to 2. Hadoop-site.xml.
These files are written in xml format. We have certain properties in these xml files, which consist of
name and value. But these files do not exist now.
77. What are the Hadoop configuration files at present?
There are 3 configuration files in Hadoop:
1. core-site.xml
2. hdfs-site.xml
3. mapred-site.xml
These files are located in the conf/ subdirectory.
78. How to exit the Vi editor?
To exit the Vi Editor, press ESC and type :q and then press enter.
79. What is a spill factor with respect to the RAM?
Spill factor is the size after which your files move to the temp file. Hadoop-temp directory is used for
this.
80. Is fs.mapr.working.dir a single directory?
Yes, fs.mapr.working.dir it is just one directory.
81. Which are the three main hdfs-site.xml properties?

The three main hdfs-site.xml properties are:
dfs.name.dir which gives you the location on which metadata will be stored and where DFS is
located – on disk or onto the remote.
dfs.data.dir which gives you the location where the data is going to be stored.
fs.checkpoint.dir which is for secondary Name Node (NN).
82. How to come out of the insert mode?
To come out of the insert mode, press ESC, type :q (if you have not written anything) OR type :wq (if
you have written anything in the file) and then press ENTER.
83. What is Cloudera and why it is used?
Cloudera is the distribution of Hadoop. It is a user created on VM by default. Cloudera belongs to

Apache and is used for data processing.
84. What happens if you get a ‘connection refused java exception’ when you type Hadoop fsck /?
It could mean that the Name Node (NN) is not working on your VM.
85. What does ‘jps’ command do?
This command checks whether your Name Node (NN), data node, task tracker, job tracker, etc are
working or not.
86. How can I restart Name Node (NN)?
Click on stop-all.sh and then click on start-all.sh OR
Write sudo hdfs (press enter), su-hdfs (press enter), /etc/init.d/ha (press enter) and then
/etc/init.d/Hadoop-0.20-Name Node (NN) start (press enter).
87. What is the full form of fsck?
Full form of fsck is File System Check.
88. How can we check whether Name Node (NN) is working or not?
To check whether Name Node (NN) is working or not, use the command
/etc/init.d/Hadoop-0.20-Name Node (NN) status or as simple as jps.
89. What does the command mapred.job.tracker do?
The command mapred.job.tracker lists out which of your nodes is acting as a job tracker.
90. What does /etc /init.d do?
/etc /init.d specifies where daemons (services) are placed or to see the status of these daemons. It is
very LINUX specific, and nothing to do with Hadoop.

91. How can we look for the Name Node (NN) in the browser?
If you have to look for Name Node (NN) in the browser, you don’t have to give localhost:8021, the
port number to look for Name Node (NN) in the brower is 50070.
92. How to change from SU to Cloudera?
To change from SU to Cloudera just type exit.
93. Which files are used by the startup and shutdown commands?
Slaves and Masters are used by the startup and the shutdown commands.
94. What do slaves consist of?
Slaves consist of a list of hosts, one per line, that host data node and task tracker servers.
95. What do masters consist of?
Masters contain a list of hosts, one per line, that are to host secondary Name Node (NN) servers.
96. What does Hadoop-env.sh do?
Hadoop-env.sh provides the environment for Hadoop to run. JAVA_HOME is set over here.
97. Can we have multiple entries in the master files?
Yes, we can have multiple entries in the Master files.
98. Where is Hadoop-env.sh file present?
Hadoop-env.sh file is present in the conf location.
99. In Hadoop_PID_DIR, what does PID stands for?
PID stands for ‘Process ID’.
100. What does /var/Hadoop/pids do?
It stores the PID.
101. What does Hadoop-metrics.properties file do?
Hadoop-metrics.properties is used for ‘Reporting‘ purposes. It controls the reporting for Hadoop.
The default status is ‘not to report‘.
102. What are the network requirements for Hadoop?
The Hadoop core uses Shell (SSH) to launch the server processes on the slave nodes. It requires
password-less SSH connection between the master and all the slaves and the secondary machines.
103. Why do we need a password-less SSH in Fully Distributed environment?

We need a password-less SSH in a Fully-Distributed environment because when the cluster is LIVE
and running in Fully
Distributed environment, the communication is too frequent. The job tracker should be able to send
a task to task tracker quickly.
104. Does this lead to security issues?
No. Not at all. Hadoop cluster is an isolated cluster. And generally it has nothing to do with an
internet. It has a different kind of a configuration. We needn’t worry about that kind of a security
breach, for instance, someone hacking through the internet, and so on. Hadoop has a very secured
way to connect to other machines to fetch and to process data.
105. On which port does SSH work?
SSH works on Port No. 22, though it can be configured. 22 is the default Port number.
106. Can you tell us more about SSH?
SSH is nothing but a secure shell communication, it is a kind of a protocol that works on a Port No.
22, and when you do an SSH, what you really require is a password.
107. Why password is needed in SSH localhost?
Password is required in SSH for security and in a situation where password-less communication is
not set.
108. Do we need to give a password, even if the key is added in SSH?
Yes, password is still required even if the key is added in SSH.
109. What if a Name Node (NN) has no data?
If a Name Node (NN) has no data it is not a Name Node (NN). Practically, Name Node (NN) will have
some data.
110. What happens to job tracker when Name Node (NN) is down?
When Name Node (NN) is down, your cluster is OFF, this is because Name Node (NN) is the single
point of failure in HDFS.
111. What happens to a Name Node (NN), when job tracker is down?
When a job tracker is down, it will not be functional but Name Node (NN) will be present. So, cluster
is accessible if Name Node (NN) is working, even if the job tracker is not working.
112. Can you give us some more details about SSH communication between Masters and the Slaves?
SSH is a password-less secure communication where data packets are sent across the slave. It has
some format into which data is sent across. SSH is not only between masters and slaves but also
between two hosts.

113. What is formatting of the DFS?
Just like we do for Windows, DFS is formatted for proper structuring. It is not usually done as it
formats the Name Node (NN) too.
114. Does the HDFS client decide the input split or Name Node (NN)?
No, the Client does not decide. It is already specified in one of the configurations through which
input split is already configured.
115. In Cloudera there is already a cluster, but if I want to form a cluster on Ubuntu can we do it?
Yes, you can go ahead with this! There are installation steps for creating a new cluster. You can
uninstall your present cluster and install the new cluster.
116. Can we create a Hadoop cluster from scratch?
Yes we can do that also once we are familiar with the Hadoop environment.
117. Can we use Windows for Hadoop?
Actually, Red Hat Linux or Ubuntu are the best Operating Systems for Hadoop. Windows is not used
frequently for installing Hadoop as there are many support problems attached with Windows. Thus,
Windows is not a preferred environment for Hadoop.
118. Can you give us some examples how Hadoop is used in real time environment?
Let us assume that we have an exam consisting of 10 Multiple-choice questions and 20 students
appear for that exam. Every student will attempt each question. For each question and each answer
option, a key will be generated. So we have a set of key-value pairs for all the questions and all the
answer options for every student. Based on the options that the students have selected, you have to
analyze and find out how many students have answered correctly. This isn’t an easy task. Here
Hadoop comes into picture! Hadoop helps you in solving these problems quickly and without much
effort. You may also take the case of how many students have wrongly attempted a particular
question.
119. What is BloomMapFile used for?
The BloomMapFile is a class that extends MapFile. So its functionality is similar to MapFile.
BloomMapFile uses dynamic Bloom filters to provide quick membership test for the keys. It is used in
Hbase table format.
120. What is PIG?
PIG is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consist of high level language for expressing data
analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. PIG’s infrastructure
layer consists of a compiler that produces sequence of MapReduce Programs.
121. What is the difference between logical and physical plans?
Pig undergoes some steps when a Pig Latin Script is converted into MapReduce jobs. After
performing the basic parsing and semantic checking, it produces a logical plan. The logical plan
describes the logical operators that have to be executed by Pig during execution. After this, Pig

produces a physical plan. The physical plan describes the physical operators that are needed to
execute the script.
122. Does ‘ILLUSTRATE’ run MR job?
No, illustrate will not pull any MR, it will pull the internal data. On the console, illustrate will not do
any job. It just shows output of each stage and not the final output.
123. Is the keyword ‘DEFINE’ like a function name?
Yes, the keyword ‘DEFINE’ is like a function name. Once you have registered, you have to define it.
Whatever logic you have written in Java program, you have an exported jar and also a jar registered
by you. Now the compiler will check the function in exported jar. When the function is not present in
the library, it looks into your jar.
124. Is the keyword ‘FUNCTIONAL’ a User Defined Function (UDF)?
No, the keyword ‘FUNCTIONAL’ is not a User Defined Function (UDF). While using UDF, we have to
override some functions. Certainly you have to do your job with the help of these functions only. But
the keyword ‘FUNCTIONAL’ is a built-in function i.e a pre-defined function, therefore it does not
work as a UDF.
125. Why do we need MapReduce during Pig programming?
Pig is a high-level platform that makes many Hadoop data analysis issues easier to execute. The
language we use for this platform is: Pig Latin. A program written in Pig Latin is like a query written in
SQL, where we need an execution engine to execute the query. So, when a program is written in Pig
Latin, Pig compiler will convert the program into MapReduce jobs. Here, MapReduce acts as the
execution engine.
126. Are there any problems which can only be solved by MapReduce and cannot be solved by PIG?
In which kind of scenarios MR jobs will be more useful than PIG?
Let us take a scenario where we want to count the population in two cities. I have a data set and
sensor list of different cities. I want to count the population by using one mapreduce for two cities.
Let us assume that one is Bangalore and the other is Noida. So I need to consider key of Bangalore
city similar to Noida through which I can bring the population data of these two cities to one
reducer. The idea behind this is somehow I have to instruct map reducer program – whenever you
find city with the name “Bangalore” and city with the name ‘Noida’, you create the alias name which
will be the common name for these two cities so that you create a common key for both the cities
and it get passed to the same reducer. For this, we have to write custom Partitioner.
In mapreduce when you create a ‘key’ for city, you have to consider ’city’ as the key. So, whenever
the framework comes across a different city, it considers it as a different key. Hence, we need to use
customized partitioner. There is a provision in mapreduce only, where you can write your custom
partitioner and mention if city = Bangalore or Noida then pass similar hash-code. However, we
cannot create custom partitioner in Pig. As Pig is not a framework, we cannot direct execution
engine to customize the partitioner. In such scenarios, MapReduce works better than Pig.
127. Does Pig give any warning when there is a type mismatch or missing field?

No, Pig will not show any warning if there is no matching field or a mismatch. If you assume that Pig
gives such a warning, then it is difficult to find in log file. If any mismatch is found, it assumes a null
value in Pig.
128. What co-group does in Pig?
Co-group joins the data set by grouping one particular data set only. It groups the elements by their
common field and then returns a set of records containing two separate bags. The first bag consists
of the record of the first data set with the common data set and the second bag consists of the
records of the second data set with the common data set.
129. Can we say cogroup is a group of more than 1 data set?
Cogroup is a group of one data set. But in the case of more than one data sets, cogroup will group all
the data sets and join them based on the common field. Hence, we can say that cogroup is a group
of more than one data set and join of that data set as well.
130. What does FOREACH do?
FOREACH is used to apply transformations to the data and to generate new data items. The name
itself is indicating that for each element of a data bag, the respective action will be performed.
Syntax : FOREACH bagname GENERATE expression1, expression2, …..
The meaning of this statement is that the expressions mentioned after GENERATE will be applied to
the current record of the data bag.
131. What is bag?
A bag is one of the data models present in Pig. It is an unordered collection of tuples with possible
duplicates. Bags are used to store collections while grouping. The size of bag is the size of the local
disk, this means that the size of the bag is limited. When the bag is full, then Pig will spill this bag into
local disk and keep only some parts of the bag in memory. There is no necessity that the complete
bag should fit into memory. We represent bags with “{}”.
132. What is a Job Tracker in Hadoop? How many instances of Job Tracker run on a Hadoop Cluster?
Job Tracker is the daemon service for submitting and tracking MapReduce jobs in Hadoop. There is
only One Job Tracker process run on any Hadoop cluster. Job Tracker runs on its own JVM process. In
a typical production cluster its run on a separate machine. Each slave node is configured with job
tracker node location. The Job Tracker is single point of failure for the Hadoop MapReduce service. If
it goes down, all running jobs are halted. Job Tracker in Hadoop performs following actions(from
Hadoop Wiki:)
Client applications submit jobs to the Job tracker.
The Job Tracker talks to the Name Node to determine the location of the data. The Job Tracker
locates Task Tracker nodes with available slots at or near the data. The Job Tracker submits the work
to the chosen Task Tracker nodes. The Task Tracker nodes are monitored. If they do not submit
heartbeat signals often enough, they are deemed to have failed and the work is scheduled on a
different Task Tracker. A Task Tracker will notify the Job Tracker when a task fails. The Job Tracker

decides what to do then: it may resubmit the job elsewhere, it may mark that specific record as
something to avoid, and it may even blacklist the Task Tracker as unreliable. When the work is
completed, the Job Tracker updates its status. Client applications can poll the Job Tracker for
information.
133. How Job Tracker schedules a task?
The Task Trackers send out heartbeat messages to the Job Tracker, usually every few minutes, to
reassure the Job Tracker that it is still alive. These message also inform the Job Tracker of the
number of available slots, so the Job Tracker can stay up to date with where in the cluster work can
be delegated. When the Job Tracker tries to find somewhere to schedule a task within the
MapReduce operations, it first looks for an empty slot on the same server that hosts the Data Node
containing the data, and if not, it looks for an empty slot on a machine in the same rack.
134. What is a Task Tracker in Hadoop? How many instances of Task Tracker run on a Hadoop Cluster
A Task Tracker is a slave node daemon in the cluster that accepts tasks (Map, Reduce and Shuffle
operations) from a Job Tracker. There is only One Task Tracker process run on any Hadoop slave
node. Task Tracker runs on its own JVM process. Every Task Tracker is configured with a set of slots,
these indicate the number of tasks that it can accept. The Task Tracker starts a separate JVM
processes to do the actual work (called as Task Instance) this is to ensure that process failure does
not take down the task tracker. The Task Tracker monitors these task instances, capturing the output
and exit codes. When the Task instances finish, successfully or not, the task tracker notifies the Job
Tracker. The Task Trackers also send out heartbeat messages to the Job Tracker, usually every few
minutes, to reassure the Job Tracker that it is still alive. These message also inform the Job Tracker of
the number of available slots, so the Job Tracker can stay up to date with where in the cluster work
can be delegated.
135. What is a Task instance in Hadoop? Where does it run?
Task instances are the actual MapReduce jobs which are run on each slave node. The Task Tracker
starts a separate JVM processes to do the actual work (called as Task Instance) this is to ensure that
process failure does not take down the task tracker. Each Task Instance runs on its own JVM process.
There can be multiple processes of task instance running on a slave node. This is based on the
number of slots configured on task tracker. By default a new task instance JVM process is spawned
for a task.
136. How many Daemon processes run on a Hadoop system?
Hadoop is comprised of five separate daemons. Each of these daemon run in its own JVM. Following
3 Daemons run on Master nodes Name Node - This daemon stores and maintains the metadata for
HDFS. Secondary Name Node - Performs housekeeping functions for the Name Node. Job Tracker -
Manages MapReduce jobs, distributes individual tasks to machines running the Task Tracker.
Following 2 Daemons run on each Slave nodes Data Node – Stores actual HDFS data blocks. Task
Tracker - Responsible for instantiating and monitoring individual Map and Reduce tasks.
137. What is configuration of a typical slave node on Hadoop cluster? How many JVMs run on a slave
node?
Single instance of a Task Tracker is run on each Slave node. Task tracker is run as a separate JVM
process.

Single instance of a Data Node daemon is run on each Slave node. Data Node daemon is run as a
separate JVM process.
One or Multiple instances of Task Instance is run on each slave node. Each task instance is run as a
separate JVM process. The number of Task instances can be controlled by configuration. Typically a
high end machine is configured to run more task instances.
138. What is the difference between HDFS and NAS ?
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system designed to run on commodity
hardware. It has many similarities with existing distributed file systems. However, the differences
from other distributed file systems are significant. Following are differences between HDFS and NAS
In HDFS Data Blocks are distributed across local drives of all machines in a cluster. Whereas in NAS
data is stored on dedicated hardware.
HDFS is designed to work with MapReduce System, since computation are moved to data. NAS is not
suitable for MapReduce since data is stored seperately from the computations.
HDFS runs on a cluster of machines and provides redundancy usinga replication protocal. Whereas
NAS is provided by a single machine therefore does not provide data redundancy.
139. How Name Node Handles data node failures?
Name Node periodically receives a Heartbeat and a Blockreport from each of the Data Nodes in the
cluster. Receipt of a Heartbeat implies that the Data Node is functioning properly. A Blockreport
contains a list of all blocks on a Data Node. When Name Node notices that it has not recieved a
hearbeat message from a data node after a certain amount of time, the data node is marked as
dead. Since blocks will be under replicated the system begins replicating the blocks that were stored
on the dead data node. The Name Node Orchestrates the replication of data blocks from one data
node to another. The replication data transfer happens directly between data nodes and the data
never passes through the namenode.
140. Does MapReduce programming model provide a way for reducers to communicate with each
other? In a MapReduce job can a reducer communicate with another reducer?
Nope, MapReduce programming model does not allow reducers to communicate with each other.
Reducers run in isolation.
141. Can I set the number of reducers to zero?
Yes, Setting the number of reducers to zero is a valid configuration in Hadoop. When you set the
reducers to zero no reducers will be executed, and the output of each mapper will be stored to a
separate file on HDFS. [This is different from the condition when reducers are set to a number
greater than zero and the Mappers output (intermediate data) is written to the Local file
system(NOT HDFS) of each mapper slave node.]
142. Where is the Mapper Output (intermediate key-value data) stored ?

The mapper output (intermediate data) is stored on the Local file system (NOT HDFS) of each
individual mapper nodes. This is typically a temporary directory location which can be setup in config
by the Hadoop administrator. The intermediate data is cleaned up after the Hadoop Job completes.
143. What are combiners? When should I use a combiner in my MapReduce Job?
Combiners are used to increase the efficiency of a MapReduce program. They are used to aggregate
intermediate map output locally on individual mapper outputs. Combiners can help you reduce the
amount of data that needs to be transferred across to the reducers. You can use your reducer code
as a combiner if the operation performed is commutative and associative. The execution of
combiner is not guaranteed, Hadoop may or may not execute a combiner. Also, if required it may
execute it more then 1 times. Therefore your MapReduce jobs should not depend on the combiners
execution.
144. What is Writable & WritableComparable interface?
org.apache.Hadoop.io.Writable is a Java interface. Any key or value type in the Hadoop Map-Reduce
framework implements this interface. Implementations typically implement a static read(DataInput)
method which constructs a new instance, calls readFields(DataInput) and returns the instance.
org.apache.Hadoop.io.WritableComparable is a Java interface. Any type which is to be used as a key

in the Hadoop Map-Reduce framework should implement this interface. WritableComparable
objects can be compared to each other using Comparators.
145. What is the Hadoop MapReduce API contract for a key and value Class?
The Key must implement the org.apache.Hadoop.io.WritableComparable interface.
The value must implement the org.apache.Hadoop.io.Writable interface.
146. What is a IdentityMapper and IdentityReducer in MapReduce ?
org.apache.Hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityMapper Implements the identity function, mapping inputs

directly to outputs. If MapReduce programmer do not set the Mapper Class using
JobConf.setMapperClass then IdentityMapper.class is used as a default value.
org.apache.Hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityReducer Performs no reduction, writing all input values

directly to the output. If MapReduce programmer do not set the Reducer Class using
JobConf.setReducerClass then IdentityReducer.class is used as a default value.
147. What is the meaning of speculative execution in Hadoop? Why is it important?
Speculative execution is a way of coping with individual Machine performance. In large clusters
where hundreds or thousands of machines are involved there may be machines which are not
performing as fast as others. This may result in delays in a full job due to only one machine not
performing well. To avoid this, speculative execution in Hadoop can run multiple copies of same map
or reduce task on different slave nodes. The results from first node to finish are used.
148. When the reducers are started in a MapReduce job?

In a MapReduce job reducers do not start executing the reduce method until the all Map jobs have
completed. Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon as they
are available. The programmer defined reduce method is called only after all the mappers have
finished.
If reducers do not start before all mappers finish then why does the progress on MapReduce job
shows something like Map(50%) Reduce(10%)? Why reducers progress percentage is displayed when
mapper is not finished yet?
Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon as they are available.
The progress calculation also takes in account the processing of data transfer which is done by
reduce process, therefore the reduce progress starts showing up as soon as any intermediate
key-value pair for a mapper is available to be transferred to reducer. Though the reducer progress is
updated still the programmer defined reduce method is called only after all the mappers have
finished.
149. What is HDFS ? How it is different from traditional file systems?
HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System, is responsible for storing huge data on the cluster. This is
a distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware. It has many similarities with
existing distributed file systems. However, the differences from other distributed file systems are
significant.
HDFS is highly fault-tolerant and is designed to be deployed on low-cost hardware.
HDFS provides high throughput access to application data and is suitable for applications that have
large data sets.
HDFS is designed to support very large files. Applications that are compatible with HDFS are those
that deal with large data sets. These applications write their data only once but they read it one or
more times and require these reads to be satisfied at streaming speeds. HDFS supports
write-once-read-many semantics on files.
150. What is HDFS Block size? How is it different from traditional file system block size?
In HDFS data is split into blocks and distributed across multiple nodes in the cluster. Each block is
typically 64Mb or 128Mb in size. Each block is replicated multiple times. Default is to replicate each
block three times. Replicas are stored on different nodes. HDFS utilizes the local file system to store
each HDFS block as a separate file. HDFS Block size can not be compared with the traditional file
system block size.
151. What is a Name Node? How many instances of Name Node run on a Hadoop Cluster?
The Name Node is the centerpiece of an HDFS file system. It keeps the directory tree of all files in the
file system, and tracks where across the cluster the file data is kept. It does not store the data of
these files itself. There is only One Name Node process run on any Hadoop cluster. Name Node runs
on its own JVM process. In a typical production cluster its run on a separate machine. The Name
Node is a Single Point of Failure for the HDFS Cluster. When the Name Node goes down, the file
system goes offline. Client applications talk to the Name Node whenever they wish to locate a file, or

when they want to add/copy/move/delete a file. The Name Node responds the successful requests
by returning a list of relevant Data Node servers where the data lives.
152. What is a Data Node? How many instances of Data Node run on a Hadoop Cluster?
A Data Node stores data in the Hadoop File System HDFS. There is only One Data Node process run
on any Hadoop slave node. Data Node runs on its own JVM process. On startup, a Data Node
connects to the Name Node. Data Node instances can talk to each other, this is mostly during
replicating data.
153. How the Client communicates with HDFS?
The Client communication to HDFS happens using Hadoop HDFS API. Client applications talk to the
Name Node whenever they wish to locate a file, or when they want to add/copy/move/delete a file
on HDFS. The Name Node responds the successful requests by returning a list of relevant Data Node
servers where the data lives. Client applications can talk directly to a Data Node, once the Name
Node has provided the location of the data.
154. How the HDFS Blocks are replicated?
HDFS is designed to reliably store very large files across machines in a large cluster. It stores each file
as a sequence of blocks; all blocks in a file except the last block are the same size. The blocks of a file
are replicated for fault tolerance. The block size and replication factor are configurable per file. An
application can specify the number of replicas of a file. The replication factor can be specified at file
creation time and can be changed later. Files in HDFS are write-once and have strictly one writer at
any time. The Name Node makes all decisions regarding replication of blocks. HDFS uses rack-aware
replica placement policy. In default configuration there are total 3 copies of a data block on HDFS, 2
copies are stored on data nodes on same rack and 3rd copy on a different rack.
Name the most common InputFormats defined in Hadoop? Which one is default ?
Following 3 are most common InputFormats defined in Hadoop
- TextInputFormat
- KeyValueInputFormat
- SequenceFileInputFormat
TextInputFormat is the hadoop default.
What is the difference between TextInputFormat and KeyValueInputFormat class?

TextInputFormat: It reads lines of text files and provides the offset of the line as key to the Mapper
and actual line as Value to the mapper
KeyValueInputFormat: Reads text file and parses lines into key, val pairs. Everything up to the first
tab character is sent as key to the Mapper and the remainder of the line is sent as value to the mapper.
What is InputSplit in Hadoop?

When a hadoop job is run, it splits input files into chunks and assign each split to a mapper to process.
This is called Input Split
How is the splitting of file invoked in Hadoop Framework ?

It is invoked by the Hadoop framework by running getInputSplit() method of the Input format class
(like FileInputFormat) defined by the user

Consider case scenario: In M/R system,
- HDFS block size is 64 MB
- Input format is FileInputFormat
- We have 3 files of size 64K, 65Mb and 127Mb
then how many input splits will be made by Hadoop framework?
Hadoop will make 5 splits as follows
- 1 split for 64K files
- 2 splits for 65Mb files
- 2 splits for 127Mb file
What is the purpose of RecordReader in Hadoop?

The InputSplit has defined a slice of work, but does not describe how to access it. The RecordReader
class actually loads the data from its source and converts it into (key, value) pairs suitable for reading
by the Mapper. The RecordReader instance is defined by the InputFormat
After the Map phase finishes, the hadoop framework does "Partitioning, Shuffle and sort". Explain
what happens in this phase?
- Partitioning
Partitioning is the process of determining which reducer instance will receive which intermediate keys
and values. Each mapper must determine for all of its output (key, value) pairs which reducer will
receive them. It is necessary that for any key, regardless of which mapper instance generated it, the
destination partition is the same
- Shuffle
After the first map tasks have completed, the nodes may still be performing several more map tasks
each. But they also begin exchanging the intermediate outputs from the map tasks to where they are
required by the reducers. This process of moving map outputs to the reducers is known as shuffling.
- Sort
Each reduce task is responsible for reducing the values associated with several intermediate keys. The
set of intermediate keys on a single node is automatically sorted by Hadoop before they are presented
to the Reducer
If no custom partitioner is defined in the hadoop then how is data partitioned before its sent to the
reducer?
The default partitioner computes a hash value for the key and assigns the partition based on this result
What is a Combiner?
The Combiner is a "mini-reduce" process which operates only on data generated by a mapper. The
Combiner will receive as input all data emitted by the Mapper instances on a given node. The output
from the Combiner is then sent to the Reducers, instead of the output from the Mappers.
What is job tracker?

Job Tracker is the service within Hadoop that runs Map Reduce jobs on the cluster
What are some typical functions of Job Tracker?

The following are some typical tasks of Job Tracker
- Accepts jobs from clients
- It talks to the NameNode to determine the location of the data
- It locates TaskTracker nodes with available slots at or near the data
- It submits the work to the chosen Task Tracker nodes and monitors progress of each task by

receiving heartbeat signals from Task tracker
What is task tracker?

Task Tracker is a node in the cluster that accepts tasks like Map, Reduce and Shuffle operations -
from a JobTracker
Whats the relationship between Jobs and Tasks in Hadoop?

One job is broken down into one or many tasks in Hadoop.
Suppose Hadoop spawned 100 tasks for a job and one of the task failed. What will hadoop do ?
It will restart the task again on some other task tracker and only if the task fails more than 4 (default
setting and can be changed) times will it kill the job
Hadoop achieves parallelism by dividing the tasks across many nodes, it is possible for a few slow
nodes to rate-limit the rest of the program and slow down the program. What mechanism Hadoop
provides to combat this ?
Speculative Execution
How does speculative execution works in Hadoop ?

Job tracker makes different task trackers process same input. When tasks complete, they announce
this fact to the Job Tracker. Whichever copy of a task finishes first becomes the definitive copy. If
other copies were executing speculatively, Hadoop tells the Task Trackers to abandon the tasks and
discard their outputs. The Reducers then receive their inputs from whichever Mapper completed
successfully, first.
Using command line in Linux, how will you

- see all jobs running in the hadoop cluster
- kill a job
- hadoop job -list
- hadoop job -kill jobid
What is Hadoop Streaming ?

Streaming is a generic API that allows programs written in virtually any language to be used as
Hadoop Mapper and Reducer implementations
What is the characteristic of streaming API that makes it flexible run map reduce jobs in languages
like perl, ruby, awk etc. ?
Hadoop Streaming allows to use arbitrary programs for the Mapper and Reducer phases of a Map
Reduce job by having both Mappers and Reducers receive their input on stdin and emit output (key,
value) pairs on stdout.
Whats is Distributed Cache in Hadoop ?

Distributed Cache is a facility provided by the Map/Reduce framework to cache files (text, archives,
jars and so on) needed by applications during execution of the job. The framework will copy the
necessary files to the slave node before any tasks for the job are executed on that node.
What is the benifit of Distributed cache, why can we just have the file in HDFS and have the
application read it ?

This is because distributed cache is much faster. It copies the file to all trackers at the start of the job.
Now if the task tracker runs 10 or 100 mappers or reducer, it will use the same copy of distributed
cache. On the other hand, if you put code in file to read it from HDFS in the MR job then every
mapper will try to access it from HDFS hence if a task tracker run 100 map jobs then it will try to read
this file 100 times from HDFS. Also HDFS is not very efficient when used like this.
What mechanism does Hadoop framework provides to synchronize changes made in Distribution
Cache during runtime of the application ?
This is a trick questions. There is no such mechanism. Distributed Cache by design is read only during
the time of Job execution
Have you ever used Counters in Hadoop. Give us an example scenario ?

Anybody who claims to have worked on a Hadoop project is expected to use counters
Is it possible to provide multiple input to Hadoop? If yes then how can you give multiple directories
as input to the Hadoop job ?
Yes, The input format class provides methods to add multiple directories as input to a Hadoop job
Is it possible to have Hadoop job output in multiple directories. If yes then how ?
Yes, by using Multiple Outputs class
What will a hadoop job do if you try to run it with an output directory that is already present? Will it
- overwrite it
- warn you and continue
- throw an exception and exit
The hadoop job will throw an exception and exit.
How can you set an arbitrary number of mappers to be created for a job in Hadoop ?
This is a trick question. You cannot set it
How can you set an arbitary number of reducers to be created for a job in Hadoop ?
You can either do it progamatically by using method setNumReduceTasksin the JobConfclass or set it
up as a configuration setting
How will you write a custom partitioner for a Hadoop job ?

To have hadoop use a custom partitioner you will have to do minimum the following three
- Create a new class that extends Partitioner class
- Override method getPartition
- In the wrapper that runs the Map Reducer, either
- add the custom partitioner to the job programtically using method setPartitionerClass or
- add the custom partitioner to the job as a config file (if your wrapper reads from config file or oozie)
How did you debug your Hadoop code ?

There can be several ways of doing this but most common ways are
- By using counters
- The web interface provided by Hadoop framework
Did you ever built a production process in Hadoop ? If yes then what was the process when your
hadoop job fails due to any reason?
Its an open ended question but most candidates, if they have written a production job, should talk
about some type of alert mechanisn like email is sent or there monitoring system sends an alert. Since
Hadoop works on unstructured data, its very important to have a good alerting system for errors since
unexpected data can very easily break the job.
Did you ever ran into a lop sided job that resulted in out of memory error, if yes then how did you
handled it ?
This is an open ended question but a candidate who claims to be an intermediate developer and has
worked on large data set (10-20GB min) should have run into this problem. There can be many ways
to handle this problem but most common way is to alter your algorithm and break down the job into
more map reduce phase or use a combiner if possible.
What is HDFS?
HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System, is a distributed file system designed to hold very large
amounts of data (terabytes or even petabytes), and provide high-throughput access to this information.
Files are stored in a redundant fashion across multiple machines to ensure their durability to failure
and high availability to very parallel applications
What does the statement "HDFS is block structured file system" means?
It means that in HDFS individual files are broken into blocks of a fixed size. These blocks are stored
across a cluster of one or more machines with data storage capacity
What does the term "Replication factor" mean?

Replication factor is the number of times a file needs to be replicated in HDFS
What is the default replication factor in HDFS?

3
What is the default block size of an HDFS block?

64Mb
What is the benefit of having such big block size (when compared to block size of linux file system
like ext)?
It allows HDFS to decrease the amount of metadata storage required per file (the list of blocks per file
will be smaller as the size of individual blocks increases). Furthermore, it allows for fast streaming
reads of data, by keeping large amounts of data sequentially laid out on the disk
Why is it recommended to have few very large files instead of a lot of small files in HDFS?
This is because the Name node contains the meta data of each and every file in HDFS and more files
means more metadata and since namenode loads all the metadata in memory for speed hence having a
lot of files may make the metadata information big enough to exceed the size of the memory on the
Name node

True/false question. What is the lowest granularity at which you can apply replication factor in HDFS
- You can choose replication factor per directory
- You can choose replication factor per file in a directory
- You can choose replication factor per block of a file
- True
- True
- False
What is a datanode in HDFS?

Individual machines in the HDFS cluster that hold blocks of data are called datanodes
What is a Namenode in HDFS?

The Namenode stores all the metadata for the file system
What alternate way does HDFS provides to recover data in case a Namenode, without backup, fails
and cannot be recovered?
There is no way. If Namenode dies and there is no backup then there is no way to recover data
Describe how a HDFS client will read a file in HDFS, like will it talk to data node or namenode ...
how will data flow etc?
To open a file, a client contacts the Name Node and retrieves a list of locations for the blocks that
comprise the file. These locations identify the Data Nodes which hold each block. Clients then read
file data directly from the Data Node servers, possibly in parallel. The Name Node is not directly
involved in this bulk data transfer, keeping its overhead to a minimum.
Using linux command line. how will you

- List the the number of files in a HDFS directory
- Create a directory in HDFS
- Copy file from your local directory to HDFS
hadoop fs -ls
hadoop fs -mkdir
hadoop fs -put localfile hdfsfile
Advantages of Hadoop?
• Bringing compute and storage together on commodity hardware: The result is blazing speed at low
cost.
• Price performance: The Hadoop big data technology provides significant cost savings (think a factor
of approximately 10) with significant performance improvements (again, think factor of 10). Your
mileage may vary. If the existing technology can be so dramatically trounced, it is worth examining if
Hadoop can complement or replace aspects of your current architecture.
• Linear Scalability: Every parallel technology makes claims about scale up.Hadoop has genuine
scalability since the latest release is expanding the limit on the number of nodes to beyond 4,000.
• Full access to unstructured data: A highly scalable data store with a good parallel programming
model, MapReduce, has been a challenge for the industry for some time. Hadoop programming model
does not solve all problems, but it is a strong solution for many tasks.
Definition of Big data?

According to Gartner, Big data can be defined as high volume, velocity and variety information
requiring innovative and cost effective forms of information processing for enhanced decision

making.
How Big data differs from database ?

Datasets which are beyond the ability of the database to store, analyze and manage can be defined as
Big. The technology extracts required information from large volume whereas the storage area is
limited for a database.
Who are all using Hadoop? Give some examples?

• A9.com
• Amazon
• Adobe
• AOL
• Baidu
• Cooliris
• Facebook
• NSF-Google
• IBM
• LinkedIn
• Ning
• PARC
• Rackspace
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter
• Yahoo!
Pig for Hadoop - Give some points?

Pig is Data-flow oriented language for analyzing large data sets.
It is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data
analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. The salient property of
Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables
them to handle very large data sets.
At the present time, Pig infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of
Map-Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., the Hadoop
subproject). Pig language layer currently consists of a textual language called Pig Latin, which has the
following key properties:
Ease of programming.
It is trivial to achieve parallel execution of simple, "embarrassingly parallel" data analysis tasks.
Complex tasks comprised of multiple interrelated data transformations are explicitly encoded as data
flow sequences, making them easy to write, understand, and maintain.
Optimization opportunities.
The way in which tasks are encoded permits the system to optimize their execution automatically,
allowing the user to focus on semantics rather than efficiency.
Extensibility.
Users can create their own functions to do special-purpose processing.
Features of Pig:
– data transformation functions

– datatypes include sets, associative arrays, tuples
– high-level language for marshalling data
- developed at yahoo!
Hive for Hadoop - Give some points?

Hive is a data warehouse system for Hadoop that facilitates easy data summarization, ad-hoc queries,
and the analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop compatible file systems. Hive provides a
mechanism to project structure onto this data and query the data using a SQL-like language called
HiveQL. At the same time this language also allows traditional map/reduce programmers to plug in
their custom mappers and reducers when it is inconvenient or inefficient to express this logic in
HiveQL.
Keypoints:
• SQL-based data warehousing application
– features similar to Pig
– more strictly SQL-type
• Supports SELECT, JOIN, GROUP BY,etc
• Analyzing very large data sets
– log processing, text mining, document indexing
• Developed at Facebook
Map Reduce in Hadoop?

Map reduce :
it is a framework for processing in parallel across huge datasets usning large no. of computers referred
to cluster, it involves two processes namely Map and reduce.
Map Process:
In this process input is taken by the master node,which divides it into smaller tasks and distribute
them to the workers nodes. The workers nodes process these sub tasks and pass them back to the
master node.
Reduce Process :
In this the master node combines all the answers provided by the worker nodes to get the results of the
original task. The main advantage of Map reduce is that the map and reduce are performed in
distributed mode. Since each operation is independent, so each map can be performed in parallel and
hence reducing the net computing time.
What is a heartbeat in HDFS?

A heartbeat is a signal indicating that it is alive. A data node sends heartbeat to Name node and task
tracker will send its heart beat to job tracker. If the Name node or job tracker does not receive heart
beat then they will decide that there is some problem in data node or task tracker is unable to perform
the assigned task.
What is a metadata?
Metadata is the information about the data stored in data nodes such as location of the file, size of the
file and so on.
Is Namenode also a commodity?

No. Namenode can never be a commodity hardware because the entire HDFS rely on it.
It is the single point of failure in HDFS. Namenode has to be a high-availability machine.

Can Hadoop be compared to NOSQL database like Cassandra?
Though NOSQL is the closet technology that can be compared to Hadoop, it has its own pros and
cons. There is no DFS in NOSQL. Hadoop is not a database. It’s a filesystem (HDFS) and distributed
programming framework (MapReduce).
What is Key value pair in HDFS?

Key value pair is the intermediate data generated by maps and sent to reduces for generating the final
output.
What is the difference between MapReduce engine and HDFS cluster?

HDFS cluster is the name given to the whole configuration of master and slaves where data is stored.
Map Reduce Engine is the programming module which is used to retrieve and analyze data.
What is a rack?
Rack is a storage area with all the datanodes put together. These datanodes can be physically located
at different places. Rack is a physical collection of datanodes which are stored at a single location.
There can be multiple racks in a single location.
How indexing is done in HDFS?

Hadoop has its own way of indexing. Depending upon the block size, once the data is stored, HDFS
will keep on storing the last part of the data which will say where the next part of the data will be. In
fact, this is the base of HDFS.
History of Hadoop?
Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Apache Lucene, the widely used text search
library. Hadoop has its origins in Apache Nutch, an open source web search engine, itself a part of the
Lucene project.
The name Hadoop is not an acronym; it’s a made-up name. The project’s creator, Doug Cutting,
explains how the name came about:
The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce,
meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria.
Subprojects and “contrib” modules in Hadoop also tend to have names that are unrelated to their
function, often with an elephant or other animal theme (“Pig,” for example). Smaller components are
given more descriptive (and therefore more mundane) names. This is a good principle, as it means you
can generally work out what something does from its name. For example, the jobtracker keeps track
of MapReduce jobs.
What is meant by Volunteer Computing?

Volunteer computing projects work by breaking the problem they are trying to solve into chunks
called work units, which are sent to computers around the world to be analyzed.
SETI@home is the most well-known of many volunteer computing projects.
How Hadoop differs from SETI (Volunteer computing)?

Although SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) may be superficially similar to MapReduce
(breaking a problem into independent pieces to be worked on in parallel), there are some significant
differences. The SETI@home problem is very CPU-intensive, which makes it suitable for running on
hundreds of thousands of computers across the world. Since the time to transfer the work unit is
dwarfed by the time to run the computation on it. Volunteers are donating CPU cycles, not bandwidth.

MapReduce is designed to run jobs that last minutes or hours on trusted, dedicated hardware running
in a single data center with very high aggregate bandwidth interconnects. By contrast, SETI@home
runs a perpetual computation on untrusted machines on the Internet with highly variable connection
speeds and no data locality.
Compare RDBMS and MapReduce?

Data size:
RDBMS - Gigabytes
MapReduce - Petabytes
Access:
RDBMS - Interactive and batch
MapReduce - Batch
Updates:
RDBMS - Read and write many times
MapReduce - Write once, read many times
Structure:
RDBMS - Static schema
MapReduce - Dynamic schema
Integrity:
RDBMS - High
MapReduce - Low
Scaling:
RDBMS - Nonlinear
MapReduce - Linear
What is HBase?
A distributed, column-oriented database. HBase uses HDFS for its underlying storage, and supports
both batch-style computations using MapReduce and point queries (random reads).
What is ZooKeeper?
A distributed, highly available coordination service. ZooKeeper provides primitives such as
distributed locks that can be used for building distributed applications.
What is Chukwa?
A distributed data collection and analysis system. Chukwa runs collectors that store data in HDFS,
and it uses MapReduce to produce reports. (At the time of this writing, Chukwa had only recently
graduated from a “contrib” module in Core to its own subproject.)
What is Avro?
A data serialization system for efficient, cross-language RPC, and persistent data storage. (At the time
of this writing, Avro had been created only as a new subproject, and no other Hadoop subprojects
were using it yet.)
core subproject in Hadoop - What is it?

A set of components and interfaces for distributed filesystems and general I/O (serialization, Java
RPC, persistent data structures).
What are all Hadoop subprojects?

Pig, Chukwa, Hive, HBase, MapReduce, HDFS, ZooKeeper, Core, Avro

What is a split?
Hadoop divides the input to a MapReduce job into fixed-size pieces called input splits, or just splits.
Hadoop creates one map task for each split, which runs the userdefined map function for each record
in the split.
Having many splits means the time taken to process each split is small compared to the time to
process the whole input. So if we are processing the splits in parallel, the processing is better
load-balanced.
On the other hand, if splits are too small, then the overhead of managing the splits and of map task
creation begins to dominate the total job execution time. For most jobs, a good split size tends to be
the size of a HDFS block, 64 MB by default, although this can be changed for the cluster
Map tasks write their output to local disk, not to HDFS. Why is this?
Map output is intermediate output: it’s processed by reduce tasks to produce the final output, and once
the job is complete the map output can be thrown away. So storing it in HDFS, with replication,
would be overkill. If the node running the map task fails before the map output has been consumed by
the reduce task, then Hadoop will automatically rerun the map task on another node to recreate the
map output.
MapReduce data flow with a single reduce task- Explain?

The input to a single reduce task is normally the output from all mappers.
The sorted map outputs have to be transferred across the network to the node where the reduce task is
running, where they are merged and then passed to the user-defined reduce function. The output of the
reduce is normally stored in HDFS for reliability.
For each HDFS block of the reduce output, the first replica is stored on the local node, with other
replicas being stored on off-rack nodes.
MapReduce data flow with multiple reduce tasks- Explain?

When there are multiple reducers, the map tasks partition their output, each creating one partition for
each reduce task. There can be many keys (and their associated values) in each partition, but the
records for every key are all in a single partition. The partitioning can be controlled by a user-defined
partitioning function, but normally the default partitioner.
MapReduce data flow with no reduce tasks- Explain?

It’s also possible to have zero reduce tasks. This can be appropriate when you don’t need the shuffle
since the processing can be carried out entirely in parallel.
In this case, the only off-node data transfer is used when the map tasks write to HDFS
What is a block in HDFS?

Filesystems deal with data in blocks, which are an integral multiple of the disk block size. Filesystem
blocks are typically a few kilobytes in size, while disk blocks are normally 512 bytes.
Why is a Block in HDFS So Large?

HDFS blocks are large compared to disk blocks, and the reason is to minimize the cost of seeks. By
making a block large enough, the time to transfer the data from the disk can be made to be
significantly larger than the time to seek to the start of the block. Thus the time to transfer a large file
made of multiple blocks operates at the disk transfer rate.
File permissions in HDFS?

HDFS has a permissions model for files and directories.

There are three types of permission: the read permission (r), the write permission (w) and the execute
permission (x). The read permission is required to read files or list the contents of a directory. The
write permission is required to write a file, or for a directory, to create or delete files or directories in
it. The execute permission is ignored for a file since you can’t execute a file on HDFS.
What is Thrift in HDFS?

The Thrift API in the “thriftfs” contrib module exposes Hadoop filesystems as an Apache Thrift
service, making it easy for any language that has Thrift bindings to interact with a Hadoop filesystem,
such as HDFS.
To use the Thrift API, run a Java server that exposes the Thrift service, and acts as a proxy to the
Hadoop filesystem. Your application accesses the Thrift service, which is typically running on the
same machine as your application.
How Hadoop interacts with C?

Hadoop provides a C library called libhdfs that mirrors the Java FileSystem interface.
It works using the Java Native Interface (JNI) to call a Java filesystem client.
The C API is very similar to the Java one, but it typically lags the Java one, so newer features may not
be supported. You can find the generated documentation for the C API in the libhdfs/docs/api
directory of the Hadoop distribution.
What is FUSE in HDFS Hadoop?

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) allows filesystems that are implemented in user space to be
integrated as a Unix filesystem. Hadoop’s Fuse-DFS contrib module allows any Hadoop filesystem
(but typically HDFS) to be mounted as a standard filesystem. You can then use Unix utilities (such as
ls and cat) to interact with the filesystem.
Fuse-DFS is implemented in C using libhdfs as the interface to HDFS. Documentation for compiling
and running Fuse-DFS is located in the src/contrib/fuse-dfs directory of the Hadoop distribution.
Explain WebDAV in Hadoop?

WebDAV is a set of extensions to HTTP to support editing and updating files. WebDAV shares can
be mounted as filesystems on most operating systems, so by exposing HDFS (or other Hadoop
filesystems) over WebDAV, it’s possible to access HDFS as a standard filesystem.
What is Sqoop in Hadoop?

It is a tool design to transfer the data between Relational database management system(RDBMS) and
Hadoop HDFS.
Thus, we can sqoop the data from RDBMS like mySql or Oracle into HDFS of Hadoop as well as
exporting data from HDFS file to RDBMS.
Sqoop will read the table row-by-row and the import process is performed in Parallel. Thus, the output
may be in multiple files.
Example:
sqoop INTO "directory";
(SELECT * FROM database.table WHERE condition;)
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Hadoop Interview Questions

1. What is BIG DATA?

2. Can you give some examples of Big Data?

4. According to IBM, what are the three characteristics of Big Data?

According to IBM, the three characteristics of Big Data are:

Volume: Facebook generating 500+ terabytes of data per day.

Variety: images, audio, video, sensor data, log files, etc.

5. How big is ‘Big Data’?

6. How analysis of Big Data is useful for organizations?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 1

9. Why the name ‘Hadoop’?

10. Why do we need Hadoop?

11. What are some of the characteristics of Hadoop framework?

12. Give a brief overview of Hadoop history?

In 2002, Doug Cutting created an open source, web crawler project.

In 2004, Google published MapReduce, GFS papers.

In 2009, Facebook launched SQL support for Hadoop.

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 2

15. What is structured and unstructured data?

16. What are the core components of Hadoop?

17. What is HDFS?

18. What are the key features of HDFS?

19. What is Fault Tolerance?

20. Replication causes data redundancy then why is pursued in HDFS?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 3

22. What is throughput? How does HDFS get a good throughput?

23. What is streaming access?

24. What is commodity hardware? Does commodity hardware include RAM?

Commodity hardware is a non-expensive system which is not of high quality or high-availability.

25. What is a Name Node (NN)?

26. Is Name Node (NN) also a commodity?

27. What is a metadata?

28. What is a Data node?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 4

30. What is a daemon?

31. What is a job tracker?

32. What is a task tracker?

34. What is a heartbeat in HDFS?

36. What is a ‘block’ in HDFS?

38. What are the benefits of block transfer?

40. How indexing is done in HDFS?

41. If a data Node is full how it’s identified?

43. Is job tracker and task trackers present in separate machines?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 6

Yes. Hadoop always require digital data to be processed.

47. Doesn’t Google have its very own version of DFS?

48. Who is a ‘user’ in HDFS?

49. Is client the end user in HDFS?

The mode of communication is SSH.

51. What is a rack?

52. On what basis data will be stored on a rack?

53. Do we need to place 2nd and 3rd data in rack 2 only?

Yes, this is to avoid data node failure.

54. What if rack 2 and data node fails?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 7

57. What is MapReduce?

58. Can you explain how do ‘map’ and ‘reduce’ work?

59. What is ‘Key value pair’ in HDFS?

61. Is map like a pointer?

No, Map is not like a pointer.

63. Why the number of splits equal to the number of maps?

Hadoop Interview Questions​Page 8

65. Which are the two types of ‘writes’ in HDFS?

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