Map Reduce - Criticism

Criticism

David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker, computer scientists specializing in parallel databases and shared-nothing architectures, have been critical of the breadth of problems that MapReduce can be used for. They called its interface too low-level and questioned whether it really represents the paradigm shift its proponents have claimed it is. They challenged the MapReduce proponents' claims of novelty, citing Teradata as an example of prior art that has existed for over two decades. They also compared MapReduce programmers to Codasyl programmers, noting both are "writing in a low-level language performing low-level record manipulation." MapReduce's use of input files and lack of schema support prevents the performance improvements enabled by common database system features such as B-trees and hash partitioning, though projects such as Pig (or PigLatin), Sawzall, Apache Hive, YSmart, HBase and BigTable are addressing some of these problems.

Another article, by Greg Jorgensen, rejects these views. Jorgensen asserts that DeWitt and Stonebraker's entire analysis is groundless as MapReduce was never designed nor intended to be used as a database.

DeWitt and Stonebraker have subsequently published a detailed benchmark study in 2009 comparing performance of Hadoop's MapReduce and RDBMS approaches on several specific problems. They concluded that databases offer real advantages for many kinds of data use, especially on complex processing or where the data is used across an enterprise, but that MapReduce may be easier for users to adopt for simple or one-time processing tasks. They have published the data and code used in their study to allow other researchers to do comparable studies.

Google has been granted a patent on MapReduce. However, there have been claims that this patent should not have been granted because MapReduce is too similar to existing products. For example, map and reduce functionality can be very easily implemented in Oracle's PL/SQL database oriented language.