Discuss the need for a Hadoop ecosystem and identify the key components.

Because Hadoop is a very low-level tool requiring considerable effort to create, manage, and use, it presents quite a few obstacles. This has resulted in a host of related applications that attempt to make Hadoop easier to use and more accessible to users who are not skilled at complex Java programming. Most organizations that use Hadoop also use a set of other related products that interact and complement each other to produce an entire ecosystem of applications and tools.

MapReduce simplification applications have been developed to simplify the process of creating MapReduce jobs. Two of the most popular are Hive and Pig.

Data ingestion applications help to ingest or gather data into Hadoop from existing systems and include Flume. Sqoop is a tool for converting data back and forth between a relational database and HDFS.

Direct query applications attempt to provide faster query access than is possible through MapReduce and include HBase and Impala.

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