Abstract: The Internet used by 3.2 billion people in 2015. Nearly half of the global population will be using the internet by the end of this year, according to a new report. Enterprises today gain vast volumes of data from different sources and influence this information by means of data analysis to support effective decision-making and provide new functionality and services. The key requirement of data analytics is scalability, simply due to the immense volume of data that need to be extracted, processed, and analyzed in a timeline fashion. Possibly the most popular framework for current large-scale data analytics is Map-Reduce, mainly due to its salient features that include scalability, fault-tolerance, ease of programming, and edibility. However, despite its merits, MapReduce has evident performance limitations in miscellaneous analytical tasks, and this has given rise to a significant body of research that aim at improving its efficiency, while maintaining its desirable properties. The aims of this review the state-of-the-art in improving the performance of parallel query processing using MapReduce. A set of the most significant weaknesses and limitations of Map-Reduce is discussed at a high level, along with solving techniques. Taxonomy is presented for categorizing existing research on MapReduce improvements according to the specific problem they target. Based on the proposed taxonomy, a classification of existing research is provided focusing on the optimization objective. Concluding, this research article outlines interesting directions for future parallel data processing systems.
Abstract: The Internet used by 3.2 billion people in 2015. Nearly half of the global population will be using the internet by the end of this year, according to a new report. Enterprises today gain vast volumes of data from different sources and influence this information by means of data analysis to support effective decision-making and provide new functionality and services. The key requirement of data analytics is scalability, simply due to the immense volume of data that need to be extracted, processed, and analyzed in a timeline fashion. Possibly the most popular framework for current large-scale data analytics is Map-Reduce, mainly due to its salient features that include scalability, fault-tolerance, ease of programming, and edibility. However, despite its merits, MapReduce has evident performance limitations in miscellaneous analytical tasks, and this has given rise to a significant body of research that aim at improving its efficiency, while maintaining its desirable properties. The aims of this review the state-of-the-art in improving the performance of parallel query processing using MapReduce. A set of the most significant weaknesses and limitations of Map-Reduce is discussed at a high level, along with solving techniques. Taxonomy is presented for categorizing existing research on MapReduce improvements according to the specific problem they target. Based on the proposed taxonomy, a classification of existing research is provided focusing on the optimization objective. Concluding, this research article outlines interesting directions for future parallel data processing systems.