Using Hadoop to perfrom DML operations on large fixed-format files
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We have a product that uses a MySQL database as the data-store. The data-store holds large amount of data. The problem we are facing is that the response time of the application is very slow. The database queries are very basic with very simple joins, if any. The root cause for the slow response time according to some senior employees is the database operations on the huge data-store. 

Another team in our company had worked on a project in the past where they processed large fixed-format files using Hadoop and dumped the contents of these files into database tables. Borrowing from this project, some of the team members feel that we can migrate from using a MySQL database to simple fixed-format files that will hold the data instead. There will be one file corresponding to each table in the database instead. We can then build another data interaction layer that provides interfaces for performing DML operations on the contents in these files. This layer will be developed using Hadoop and the MapReduce programming model.  

At this point, several questions come to my mind. 
1. Does the problem statement fit into the kind of problems that are solved using Hadoop?
2. How will the application ask the data interaction layer to fetch/update/delete the required data? As far as my understanding goes, the files containing the data will reside on HDFS. We will spawn a Hadoop job that will process the required file (similar to a table in the db) and fetch the required data. This data will be written to an outout file on HDFS. We will have to parse this file to get the required content. 
3. Will the approach of using fixed format-files and processing them with Hadoop truly solve the problem?

I have managed to set up a simple node cluster with two Ubuntu machines but after playing around with Hadoop for a while, I feel that the problem statement is not a good fit for Hadoop. I could be completely wrong and therefore want to know whether Hadoop fits into this scenario or is it just a waste of time as the problem statement is not in line with what Hadoop is meant for?

