The tools of the Big Data revolution promise new insights for any organization with the energy and know-how to get started. The ADMIN Magazine Practical Hadoop Special Edition offers an up-close look at the popular Apache Hadoop framework -- a leading open source Big Data analysis tool that is available at no cost to any user. We show you why you don't need an enterprise-scale business to benefit from Hadoop. We also discuss some high-performance computing techniques for the Hadoop environment, and we describe some new features available with the Hadoop 2 release.