The Apache Software Foundation has launched Drill, the latest project, which serves as a mechanism to enable faster queries of data sets for Hadoop users.  According to Tomer Shiran, director of product management for Hadoop and founding member of the Drill project, the new software has been established as an Apache Incubator Project, so continued development has been opened up to software designers all around the globe.

“There’s quite a few people actively developing on the project now, so I don’t think it will be a long time before we have an early version released.”

“We’ve spent quite a few months talking to lots of organizations and potential users of Drill and to our customer base as well,” Shiran said, “We want to put this out there as an open-source project, rather than just keep it within MapR for our use alone.”

Two versions of Hadoop are offered through MapR: MapR M3, which is the basic version that does not cost anything and MapR M5, which has more advanced features like the ability to make data snapshots and 24/7 support.

An open-source of Google’s Dremel will be created through the new project for Hadoop tools. Google uses Dremel to speed up its internal use of Hadoop data analysis tools.

Hadoop processes large data sets and Drill will assist in improving this method by doing “interactive analysis” that can find answers needed in the data a lot faster. Drill was actually inspired by Dremel and helps Google perform data analyses on large data sets such as: tracking install data for applications on Android Market, analyzing spam, analyzing test results on Google’s distributed build system and analyzing crawled Web documents.

“Interactive data is much faster than batch processing,” according to Shiran.

Because Drill was developed as an Apache open-source project, Drill’s APIs and flexible architecture will be able to support a wide range of data sources, data query and languages.