Jaspersoft, a maker of big data-oriented BI software, released a new infographic it calls the Big Data Index – a list of all the top big data connectors, along with statistics and trends for the period between January 2011 and January 2012.

Overall, Jaspersoft’s data says that over 15,000 connector downloads were record in those 12 months, a figure that is expected by most industry insiders to increase significantly this year. Hive, the SQL interface for MapReduce, ranks highest in the infographic thanks to a 60 percent share of the pie chart, followed by HBase. The latter is the distributed Java-based database that can quite often be found running on top of HDFS in enterprise deployments.

Cassandra also made it to what this very narrowed list, and even the last spot gives it a certain status. The remaining 27 percent of connector downloads is accounted by CouchDB, Riak and other smaller offerings.

In terms of growth, MongoDB caught the spotlight.  The C++ based document-like database has seen a 200 usages increase in 2012, and dominated the infographic with an almost completely smooth growth curve. Hive followed, ahead of the very zigzag-y Hadoop HBase and Cassandra, which remained pretty much flat in this department.

“Extracting insights quickly from Big Data sources like Hadoop or MongoDB yields tremendous competitive advantage for companies,” said Karl Van den Bergh, VP of Products and Alliances at Jaspersoft. “By tracking the Big Data Index, we see three popular approaches to access Big Data environments in business intelligence. These include reporting and analysis through direct connectivity, direct batch style reporting, and extracting data through batch ETL to a central warehouse or database.”

Hadoop has always been a big support for Jaspersoft which they began supporting the analytics engine over a year ago with their BI server. They just recently added ETL support with their partnership with Talend.