does anyone find Cascading for Hadoop Map Reduce useful?

Question

I\'ve been trying Cascading, but I cannot see any advantage over the classic map reduce approach for writing jobs.

Map Reduce jobs gives me more freedom and Cascading se

Answer 1

I used Cascading with Bixo to write the complete anti-spam link classification pipeline for a large social network.

The Cascading pipeline resulted in 27 MR jobs, which would have been very difficult to maintain in plain MR. I have written MR jobs before, but using something like Cascading feels like switching from Assembler to Java (insert_fav_language_here).

One of the big advantages over Hive or Pig IMHO is that Cascading is a single jar, which you bundle with your job. Pig and Hive have more dependencies (e.g. MySQL) or are not as easy to embed.

Disclaimer: While I know Chris Wensel personally, I really think Cascading is kick a**. Considering its complexity it is extremely impressive that I haven't found a single bug using it.