MapReduce in terms of SQL
I found a great explanation of MapReduce in terms of SQL in a blog post about Hadoop by Chris Stucchio:
SQL-ish pseudocode:
SELECT G(...) FROM table GROUP BY F(...)
[…]
The only thing you are permitted to touch is
F(k,v)
andG(k,v)
, except of course for performance optimizations (usually not the fun kind!) at intermediate steps. Everything else is fixed.