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

Cascading allows you to use simple field names and tuples in place of the primitive types offered by Hadoop which, "... tend to be at the wrong level of granularity for creating sophisticated, highly composable code that can be shared among different developers" (Tom White, Hadoop The Definitive Guide). Cascading was designed to solve those problems. Keep in mind, some of the applications like Cascading, Hive, Pig, etc, were developed in parallel and sometimes do the same thing. If you don't like Cascading or find it confusing, maybe you would be better of using something else?

I'm sure you already have this, but here is the user guide: http://www.cascading.org/1.1/userguide/pdf/userguide.pdf. It provides a decent walk through of the flow of data in a typical Cascading application.