I doubt it, simply because it's so easy to find big datasets to work on. It doesn't have to be professional, that's the nice thing about a data driven professio

I doubt it, simply because it's so easy to find big datasets to work on. It doesn't have to be professional, that's the nice thing about a data driven profession. Check out http://www.kdnuggets.com/ http://www.kdnuggets.com/ for links to large data sets to work on and there are also some on amazon. Also, yes you can certainly run hadoop on a single instance, but once you get into "real big" sizes you'll need a cluster to demonstrate expertise, be it on your local machines at your house or on a set of VPS or EC2 or whatever.