21.What is a ‘block’ in HDFS?
A ‘block’ is the minimum amount of data that can be read or written. In HDFS, the default block size is 64 MB as contrast to the block size of 8192 bytes in Unix/Linux. Files in HDFS are broken down into block-sized chunks, which are stored as independent units. HDFS blocks are large as compared to disk blocks, particularly to minimize the cost of seeks. If a particular file is 50 mb, will the HDFS block still consume 64 mb as the default size? No, not at all! 64 mb is just a unit where the data will be stored. In this particular situation, only 50 mb will be consumed by an HDFS block and 14 mb will be free to store something else. It is the MasterNode that does data allocation in an efficient manner.
22.What are the benefits of block transfer?
A file can be larger than any single disk in the network. There’s nothing that requires the blocks from a file to be stored on the same disk, so they can take advantage of any of the disks in the cluster. Making the unit of abstraction a block rather than a file simplifies the storage subsystem. Blocks provide fault tolerance and availability. To insure against corrupted blocks and disk and machine failure, each block is replicated to a small number of physically separate machines (typically three). If a block becomes unavailable, a copy can be read from another location in a way that is transparent to the client?
23.How indexing is done in HDFS?
Hadoop has its own way of indexing. Depending upon the block size, once the data is stored, HDFS will keep on storing the last part of the data which will say where the next part of the data will be.
24.Are job tracker and task trackers present in separate machines?
Yes, job tracker and task tracker are present in different machines. The reason is job tracker is a single point of failure for the Hadoop MapReduce service. If it goes down, all running jobs are halted.
25.What is the communication channel between client and namenode/datanode?
The mode of communication is SSH.
26.What is a rack?
Rack is a storage area with all the datanodes put together. These datanodes can be physically located at different places. Rack is a physical collection of datanodes which are stored at a single location. There can be multiple racks in a single location.
27.What is a Secondary Namenode? Is it a substitute to the Namenode?
The secondary Namenode constantly reads the data from the RAM of the Namenode and writes it into the hard disk or the file system. It is not a substitute to the Namenode, so if the Namenode fails, the entire Hadoop system goes down.
28.Explain how do ‘map’ and ‘reduce’ works.
Namenode takes the input and divide it into parts and assign them to data nodes. These datanodes process the tasks assigned to them and make a key-value pair and returns the intermediate output to the Reducer. The reducer collects this key value pairs of all the datanodes and combines them and generates the final output.
29.Why ‘Reading‘ is done in parallel and ‘Writing‘ is not in HDFS?
Through mapreduce program the file can be read by splitting its blocks when reading. But while writing as the incoming values are not yet known to the system mapreduce cannot be applied and no parallel writing is possible.
30.Copy a directory from one node in the cluster to another
Use ‘-distcp’ command to copy,
