The emergence of Hadoop as the de facto Big Data operating system has brought on a flurry of beliefs and expectations that are sometimes simply untrue. Organizations embarking on their Hadoop journey face multiple pitfalls that, if not proactively addressed, will lead to wasted time, runaway expenditures and performance bottlenecks. By proactively anticipating these issues and utilizing smarter tools, the full potential of Hadoop may be realized. Syncsort has identified five pitfalls that should be avoided with Hadoop.