UPDATED 14:16 EDT / AUGUST 31 2012

Apache Drill to Provide SQL-Like Fast Answers to Specific Questions from Hadoop Databases

In what he terms “yet another example of the remarkable innovation occurring in the open source Big Data Community,” Wikibon Big Data Analyst Jeff Kelly writes that a small group of committers is developing an open source SQL-like query tool for Hadoop databases called “Apache Drill”.

Designed after BigQuery, Google’s Big-Data-Analytics-as-a-Service technology that it made publicly available in May, Apache Drill is meant to compliment MapReduce, allowing business people to get answers to specific questions such as “what time of day is most popular for app downloads” from Apache Hadoop Big Data databases directly in seconds. MapReduce, by contrast, is a much more technically complex query languages for use by professional Data Scientists to answer much larger questions such as identifying hidden customer behavior patterns from years of unstructured data.

Apache Drill is far from ready for general use, however. It is presently in incubator status with eight committers, including two from MapR, actively developing it. Kelly notes that some MapR projects have remained closed source. However, MapR executives say they are committed to keeping Drill open source because they believe that the open source community can help drive development faster than an internal team.

Given the project’s immaturity, Kelly recommends that organizations with immediate needs for real-time Big Data query support consider alternative approaches including the Google BigQuery service while keeping an eye on Drill’s progress.

As with all Wikibon research, this Professional Alert is available free to the public. Interested IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community. This gives them the ability to add comments to research and to post their own articles and allows them to receive invitations to Wikibon Peer Incite meetings.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU