At Hadoop World today, a new tool was released from Quest Software and Cloudera, the company behind Hadoop. Called OraOop, it’s a connector between Oracle and Apache Hadoop, allowing for fast, scalable data transfer between the respective databases.

OraOop was developed by Quest as a free plug-in to Sqoop, Clouder’a existing open-source framework. What OraOop does is enhance Sqoop for faster performance, circumventing the scalability issues that Sqoop has. Seeing as it’s part of the Hadoop project, OraOop is a freeware download, and is a supported component of Cloudera Enterprise.

“The most common use is from organizations that want to transfer data from their Oracle databases into Hadoop in order to take advantage of Hadoop’s lower cost of storage and analytical capabilities,” said Guy Harrison, director of development at Quest Software. Today’s release of OraOop provides them with an enterprise-ready tool to move data between Oracle and Hadoop.”

The aim with OraOop is to reduce overhead for managing a database, particularly with Oracle services. Utilizing freeware to help optimize in this way is a key benefit for the virtualization process, as businesses recognize the need to do things like reduce CPU consumption and IO time. Quest reports up to 80% reduction in CPU consumption during testing.

Improving compatibility is the way in which OraOop does this, presenting an after-market solution that can help tweak database management. In the end such partnerships facilitate Cloudera’s appeal with the enterprise market, which has been a recent area of focus for the company. This looks to be the first of several steps OraOop will take towards continuing on that path. See here for our CUBE interview with Cloudera Co-Founder Amr Awadallah on the company’s aims for the enterprise (video also embedded below).

“OraOop has a robust roadmap in place, and we look forward to future releases that continue to improve compatibility and performance of data transfer between Oracle and Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop,” said Ed Albanese, business development at Cloudera.

We’ll be covering Hadoop World here, as well as SiliconANGLE.TV, be sure to catch it all!