Comparing against Impala doesn't change anything, Impala is still well behind even on a cluster with just 600 million records : https://docs.google.com/spreads

Comparing against Impala doesn't change anything, Impala is still well behind even on a cluster with just 600 million records : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQ09vI0R_wIdEVMeTQwZGJSOVQwcFRSRFFFUmcxWWc#gid=6 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQ09vI0R_wIdEV... Your other considerations are still valid though. Although the point was to show the inefficiency of Hadoop/MapReduce when it comes to relational operations.