Is MapR a substitute for MapReduce

Question

I see a substitution for mapreduce jobs, MapR, which can read data directly from stream and process it. Is my understanding correct?

Are there any samples that I can refer?
Is it commercial?
Is there any catch in using it?
Is it a substitution for flume?
Can we use it with apache hadoop? If yes, then why does the distribution only talk about yarn and mapreduce and not MapR?

Answer 1

MapR is a commercial distribution of Apache Hadoop with HDFS replaced with MapR-FS. Essentially it is the same Hadoop and same Map-Reduce jobs running on top of with, covered with tons of marketing that causes the confusion and questions like yours. 

1. For stream processing on top of MapR you can use Apache Spark Streaming, Apache Flume, Apache Storm - it depends on the task you need to solve
2. Yes, it is commercial, licensed per-node basis as far as I know. You can easily contact their sales guys, they would be glad to explain the prices and terms
3. Just like the other Hadoop distributions, but personally I would prefer fully open-source platform rather than proprietary MapR-FS, but its up to you to choose
4. No
5. Because Apache Hadoop is part of many commercial distributions: Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, Pivotal, etc. When you read about Hadoop, you read about the system architecture, and not about the commercial packages that offer its support for enterprises