Chaining multiple MapReduce jobs in Hadoop

I think this tutorial on Yahoo's developer network will help you with this: Chaining Jobs

You use the JobClient.runJob(). The output path of the data from the first job becomes the input path to your second job. These need to be passed in as arguments to your jobs with appropriate code to parse them and set up the parameters for the job.

I think that the above method might however be the way the now older mapred API did it, but it should still work. There will be a similar method in the new mapreduce API but i'm not sure what it is.

As far as removing intermediate data after a job has finished you can do this in your code. The way i've done it before is using something like:

FileSystem.delete(Path f, boolean recursive);

Where the path is the location on HDFS of the data. You need to make sure that you only delete this data once no other job requires it.

There are many ways you can do it.

(1) Cascading jobs

Create the JobConf object "job1" for the first job and set all the parameters with "input" as inputdirectory and "temp" as output directory. Execute this job:

JobClient.run(job1).

Immediately below it, create the JobConf object "job2" for the second job and set all the parameters with "temp" as inputdirectory and "output" as output directory. Execute this job:

JobClient.run(job2).

(2) Create two JobConf objects and set all the parameters in them just like (1) except that you don't use JobClient.run.

Then create two Job objects with jobconfs as parameters:

Job job1=new Job(jobconf1); 
Job job2=new Job(jobconf2);

Using the jobControl object, you specify the job dependencies and then run the jobs:

JobControl jbcntrl=new JobControl("jbcntrl");
jbcntrl.addJob(job1);
jbcntrl.addJob(job2);
job2.addDependingJob(job1);
jbcntrl.run();

(3) If you need a structure somewhat like Map+ | Reduce | Map*, you can use the ChainMapper and ChainReducer classes that come with Hadoop version 0.19 and onwards.

There are actually a number of ways to do this. I'll focus on two.

One is via Riffle ( http://github.com/cwensel/riffle ) an annotation library for identifying dependent things and 'executing' them in dependency (topological) order.

Or you can use a Cascade (and MapReduceFlow) in Cascading ( http://www.cascading.org/ ). A future version will support Riffle annotations, but it works great now with raw MR JobConf jobs.

A variant on this is to not manage MR jobs by hand at all, but develop your application using the Cascading API. Then the JobConf and job chaining is handled internally via the Cascading planner and Flow classes.

This way you spend your time focusing on your problem, not on the mechanics of managing Hadoop jobs etc. You can even layer different languages on top (like clojure or jruby) to even further simplify your development and applications. http://www.cascading.org/modules.html