I think any corporate data warehouse is an area that Hadoop+Pig/Hive could add a huge amount of value. Here's why. Conventional data warehouses are built from r

I think any corporate data warehouse is an area that Hadoop+Pig/Hive could add a huge amount of value. Here's why. Conventional data warehouses are built from running ETL transforms against existing sources, where you are carefully selecting which attributes you want to transform in. These transforms are tricky to set up and even trickier to change if you decide you need a new piece of data (which happens every day in big BI implementations). And if the source system isn't permanently preserving the data (eg. log files) then pulling in data retrospectively often isn't possible. With a HDFS cluster you can cost effectively dump undifferentiated data from existing sources into a "data lake" without worrying about complex and highly selective transforms, and then use tools like Pig and Hive to do ad-hoc interrogations of the data. Most data warehouse implementations fail to a large extent because of the ETL problem - Hadoop could help solve that in a big way. Further reading (no connection to me) http://www.pentaho.com/hadoop/ http://www.pentaho.com/hadoop/