What exactly is hadoop namenode formatting?

hadoop formatting principles
Ace picture Ace · Sep 18, 2013 · Viewed 33.9k times · Source

What exactly is involved in namenode formatting. If I type in the following command into my terminal within my hadoop installation folder:

  bin/hadoop namenode -format

What exactly does it accomplish? I am looking to understand principles of namenode formatting & its significance. Thanks...

Answer

techvineet picture techvineet · Sep 18, 2013

Hadoop NameNode is the centralized place of an HDFS file system which keeps the directory tree of all files in the file system, and tracks where across the cluster the file data is kept. In short, it keeps the metadata related to datanodes. When we format namenode it formats the meta-data related to data-nodes. By doing that, all the information on the datanodes are lost and they can be reused for new data.

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