Hortonworks today announced the submission of two new incubation projects to the Apache Software Foundation and the launch of the Stinger Initiative, three efforts aimed at enhancing the security and performance of Hadoop applications.

Hortonworks is fully supporting Hive as the standard query engine of Hadoop while not pursuing any other alternative architectures in establishing Hadoop beyond a batch environment.  Hortonworks main competitor Cloudera announced Impala at the recent Hadoop World / Strata last fall.  Cloudera’s Impala is an alternative query engine for Hadoop that some say is very much needed for real time while others say “Pure Hive” is the right approach.  I’ll be at Strata next week with SiliconANGLE TV theCUBE so we’ll see how both companies respond to the different approaches.

The new efforts focus on enterprise requirements that are essential for broad adoption across the Hadoop ecosystem:

• The Stinger Initiative to Optimize Apache Hive for Interactive Queries: Stinger represents a concerted effort by Hortonworks and the broader Apache community to improve Hive performance and better serve business intelligence use cases such as interactive data exploration, visualization and parameterized reporting. It is complementary to best-of-breed data warehouse and analytic platforms. As approximately 50 percent of Hadoop users depend on Hive for SQL-based operational data processing, enhancing Hive’s SQL capabilities and optimizing its query performance in support of user-focused SQL interactions is critical to ensuring Hive remains the de-facto standard for SQL queries with Hadoop. Additional details can be found here: http://hortonworks.com/blog/100x-faster-hive
• Tez Next-generation Runtime Proposed as Apache Incubator Project: The Tez proposal aims to enhance the performance of Hadoop components that currently run on MapReduce, such as Apache Hive, by providing an alternative, next-generation runtime built on Hadoop YARN that significantly improves latency and throughput of Hadoop applications. Additional project details can be found here:http://hortonworks.com/blog/introducing-tez-faster-hadoop-processing
• Hadoop Gateway Proposed as Apache Incubator Project: The Hadoop Gateway proposal addresses the need for a single point of authentication and secure access for Apache Hadoop services in a cluster, which will simplify Hadoop security for users who access data and execute jobs and operators who control and manage the cluster. Additional details can be found here: http://hortonworks.com/blog/introducing-knox-hadoop-security

“Our approach to innovation has been consistent from when our team began their work on the Hadoop project at Yahoo! more than seven years ago,” said Greg Pavlik, vice president of engineering for Hortonworks. “Simply put, we believe that the fastest way to innovate is to do our work within the open source community, introduce enterprise feature requirements into the public domain, and collaborate with others to progress existing open source projects or incubate new projects to meet those needs. By staying true to our 100-percent open source philosophy and applying enterprise software rigor to the test and release process, we can continue to accelerate the adoption of Hadoop within mainstream enterprises.”

Hortonworks continues to stay focused on a pure 100% open source business plan.  At Strata we will hear many new companies pitch different approaches to the distribution of Hadoop.   What’s more interesting is the movement toward other bigger vendors looking to build their own proprietary Hadoop distributions in the hope they can be “enterprise grade”.