The scarcest resource in big data is analyst grey matter, not CPU cycles. Distributed computing can be a bad choice for data analysis because it transfers work

The scarcest resource in big data is analyst grey matter, not CPU cycles. Distributed computing can be a bad choice for data analysis because it transfers work from computers to humans: analysts have to spend time explicitly thinking about how to express their queries in a form that could be efficiently parallelized. The fact that every big data vendor advertises its product as doing this work for you is a good sign that it's a pain point.