App developers looking to move into Big Data would be wise to get themselves up to speed on SAP HANA, even as they slog their way through learning Hadoop. Maybe I should clarify. Chances are you may have already aligned yourself with the Hadoop ecosystem, given the opportunities created by an absence of available apps and tech executives offering to help line up the funding needed to create them. But taking advantage of this isn't easy. To develop apps for Hadoop, you'll have to know incredibly difficult programming like Map/Reduce. Plus, Hadoop is limited to analysis-only systems verses transactional ones, points out Forbes's Dan Woods. That's one reason people are slow to become Hadoop developers. Because of its restrictions, developers have to be familiar with not only Hadoop but a bevy of other components. In a nutshell, it may be awhile before your desire to work with Hadoop is realized. And this is why it could be beneficial to learn SAP HANA. Says Woods:
Many of the goals that the Hadoop ecosystem is seeking to provide are provided by SAP HANA. Therefore, a startup that is ruthless about accelerating time to market for a big data solution should consider combining the ability of Hadoop to distill and analyze huge amounts of data with SAP HANA's ability to deliver an in-memory, read/write database that can simultaneous analyze data and support transaction-oriented applications.
SAP HANA offers many of the capabilities next generation apps will need, like pre-transaction data analysis. In other words, if you're looking for a way into big data, SAP HANA may be the faster route.

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