It was funny I was at the UK Hadoop User Group a couple of days before this feature was announced. As Tom says in the article this was a feature that people wan

It was funny I was at the UK Hadoop User Group a couple of days before this feature was announced. As Tom says in the article this was a feature that people wanted for Hadoop and then as if by magic it appears. Tom has done a really great breakdown of why it's useful. I would also really recommend watching his talk from the usergroup http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/cloud-grid/hadoop-on-amazon-s3ec2 http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/cloud-grid/hadoop-on-amazon-... . I also did a blog post for YDN which has a video with some more thoughts from Tom and other people http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/08/uk_hadoop_user.html http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/08/uk_hadoop_u... .