This has been a huge week for the big data industry. Thousands of experts from a broad range of industries flocked to Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York this week to share their angle on analytics, and the big names vendors followed close behind with their new product announcements.

Cloudera earned a lot of headlines by introducing Impala, a MapReduce alternative that is capable of churning out results at the “speed of thought”. Batch analytics with Hadoop is much speedier and more agile than traditional databases solutions, but Impala’s real-time functionality takes this usefulness to a whole new level.

Dell’s Quest also had a major debut. The subsidiary announced that it has added three new Hadoop products to its partner company’s portfolio, including  Kitenga Analytics, a modified version of its ShareFlex replication software that’s compatible with the big data platform, and an upcoming release of Toad. The new edition of the DB development tool, which is used by over two million IT database gurus around the world, will also feature Hadoop integration.

A similar announcement came out from Continuuity this week. The startup pulled back the curtain on Big Data AppFabric, a set of developer tools and a hosted runtime environment specifically designed for the creation of data-driven applications. On the same day, virtualization giant VMware also pushed analytics one step closer to the cloud.

The company unveiled the latest version of Serengeti, a framework that allows Hadoop to run on vSphere VMs. The vendor agnostic solution is now compatible with several more distributions and offers expanded functionality with augmented configuration options and a new UI contributed by the community.

TIBCO is also noteworthy name this week. The vendor launched a new add-on for one of its flagship products to provide native integration with the kind of data streams used  in the oil and gas industry.