Show HN: Hadoop in Excel

Hi, I&#x27;m one of the developers. I&#x27;d be happy to answer any questions you have on this.<p>If you&#x27;re in New York, I&#x27;d love to meet you in person at our Big Data in Excel meetup this Monday: <a href="http://www.meetup.com/DataNitro/events/149402612/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;DataNitro&#x2F;events&#x2F;149402612&#x2F;</a><p>And, as the page says, we&#x27;re looking for beta users! If you&#x27;re interested in this, know someone who might be, or just have an opinion, I&#x27;d love to talk to you. You can comment here or reach me at ben at datanitro.com.

Did you write your mappers and reducers in java using the hadoop api or does this translate into hiveql or some other higher-level language? Great job btw, this looks super helpful for the business types to get useful reports on their own rather than interrupt the workflow of someone with more formal training (huge issue typically).

What are you using on the back-end to perform the queries? Are you using MapReduce? What is the average latency expectations when using the application?

Funny as this sounds it may be in fact exactly perfect for a large subset of Hadoop use-cases. If it works well.

Being pretty naive to the space, I&#x27;m assuming the killer differentiator from Microsoft&#x27;s own Power Query (which looks like it can pull from Hadoop) is that this pulls a subset of data as an initial workspace, while Power Query pulls all of the data? Any other key differences?<p>Really cool tool! Wish I had some large real-world Hadoop cluster to try it out on...

I think this would really benefit from a dead simple tool that would allow users to import from csv files into a local Hadoop instance, without having to do anything besides install Hadoop. But this seems like something that could really democratize data analysis on large data sets considering the number of people who are pretty good with Excel.

I&#x27;ve seen demos of a tool called Datameer which seems to offer very similar functionality (an Excel-like interface for configuring a job on a small set of data, followed by submission of that job to a Hadoop cluster as a MapReduce job). How does DataNitro compare to that?

Ummmm...doesn&#x27;t Excel have a row limit of somewhere around 1 million?

Can Excel open a 1-billion-row data file?

While impressive in terms of a technical achievement, Excel is a pretty appalling analysis tool generally. I fear for what it will turn into when you throw this much at it. Big Data doesn&#x27;t let you power through being wrong.