Top 30 Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Interview Questions You Must Prepare 19.Mar.2024

Written in Java, Hadoop framework has the capability of solving issues involving Big Data analysis. Its programming model is based on Google MapReduce and infrastructure is based on Google’s Big Data and distributed file systems. Hadoop is scalable and more nodes can be added to it.

Blocks in HDFS cannot be broken. Master node calculates the required space and how data would be trferred to a machine having lower space.

Data node is the slave deployed in each of the systems and provides the actual storage locations and serves read and writer requests for clients.

Rack is the storage location where all the data nodes are put together. Thus it is a physical collection of data nodes stored in a single location.

HDFS is filing system use to store large data files. It handles streaming data and running clusters on the commodity hardware.

Introduce in 2002 by Doug Cutting, Hadoop was used in Google MapReduce and HDFS project in 2004 and 20@Yahoo and Facebook adopted it in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Major commercial enterprises using Hadoop include EMC, Hortonworks, Cloudera, MaOR, Twitter, EBay, and Amazon among others.

Name node contains metadata or information in respect of all the data nodes and it will decide which data node to be used for storing data.

Daemons that run on What data nodes, the task tracers take care of individual tasks on slave node as entrusted to them by job tracker.

Facebook alone generates more than 500 terabytes of data daily whereas many other organizations like Jet Air and Stock Exchange Market generates 1+ terabytes of data every hour. These are Big Data.

The three characteristics of Big Data are volume, velocity, and veracity. Earlier it was assessed in megabytes and gigabytes but now the assessment is made in terabytes.

Data scientists analyze data and provide solutions for business problems. They are gradually replacing business and data analysts.

RDBMS can be useful for single files and short data whereas Hadoop is useful for handling Big Data in one shot.

Big Data refers to assortment of huge amount of data which is difficult capturing, storing, processing or reprieving. Traditional database management tools cannot handle them but Hadoop can.

Main components of Hadoop are HDFS used to store large databases and MapReduce used to analyze them.

HDFS works on the principle of “write once, read many” and the focus is on fast and accurate data retrieval. Steaming access refers to reading the complete data instead of retrieving single record from the database.

Name node is the master node in HDFS and job tracker runs on it. The node contains metadata and works as high availability machine and single pint of failure in HDFS. It cannot be commodity as the entire HDFS works on it.

The communication mode for clients with name node and data node in HDFS is SSH.

Hadoop forms part of Apache project provided by Apache Software Foundation.

Hadoop processes the digital data only.

Once data is stored HDFS will depend on the last part to find out where the next part of data would be stored.

Systems with average configuration are vulnerable to crash at any time. HDFS replicates and stores data at three different locations that makes the system highly fault tolerant. If data at one location becomes corrupt and is inaccessible it can be retrieved from another location.

This insightful Cloudera article shows the steps for running HDFS on a cluster.

No! The calculation would be made on the original node only. In case the node fails then only the master node would replicate the calculation on to a second node.

Great fault tolerance, high throughput, suitability for handling large data sets, and streaming access to file system data are the main features of HDFS. It can be built with commodity hardware.

Data nodes and task trackers send heartbeat signals to Name node and Job tracker respectively to inform that they are alive. If the signal is not received it would indicate problems with the node or task tracker.

Daemon is the process that runs in background in the UNIX environment. In Windows it is ‘services’ and in DOS it is ‘TSR’.

Analysis of Big Data identifies the problem and focus points in an enterprise. It can prevent big losses and make profits helping the entrepreneurs take informed decision.

When a data node is full and has no space left the name node will identify it.

With Hadoop the user can run applications on the systems that have thousands of nodes spreading through innumerable terabytes. Rapid data processing and trfer among nodes helps uninterrupted operation even when a node fails preventing system failure.

Windows and Linux are the preferred operating system though Hadoop can work on OS x and BSD.