SiliconANGLE and Wikibon teamed up again on another successful theCUBE live multiday broadcast at O’Reilly Media Strata Conference.  Four days of non-stop, continuous coverage all week covering the show, as well as two major Big Data announcements early in the week.

Here is a summary of the top insights in case you missed the action.  All the videos will be available on Youtube.com/SiliconANLGE.

Hadoop Distribution War Heats Up; Is SQL the Future of NoSQL?

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Two major themes have emerged: (1) the Hadoop distribution competition is hot and getting hotter and (2) bringing SQL to Big Data is gaining acceptance as the preferred way to democratize Big Data.

Big Players Intel and EMC Validate Hadoop Market

On Monday morning, at Dogpatch Studios in Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, Greenplum announced a new Hadoop distribution called Pivotal HD.  EMC aggressively positioned their offering as superior to all the other approaches in the marketplace highlighting performance in traditional data warehouse and business intelligence market as their key differentiator.  The following morning, Intel jumped into the Hadoop distribution market with the announcement of its own Hadoop distro, Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software, at an event in downtown San Francisco.  Intel played up their experience and expertise.  Intel emphasized their professionalism and ecosystem support in order to extend the ecosystem mission to accelerate mainstream adoption.

The two moves illustrate, if there was any doubt, that there is big money to be made in Hadoop. The current competitors in the Hadoop distribution market include no fewer than six vendors: four start-ups, Hortonworks, WANdisco, MapR and Cloudera, and two industry whales, Intel and EMC.

Intel’s entrance into the market is particularly telling. The company known for its silicon chips is actually the seventh largest software maker on the planet. So, from Wikibon’s perspective, that Intel is entering a software market isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is that the company didn’t choose instead to partner with an existing Hadoop distribution vendor.

Intel’s motivation, however, is not to become the number one Hadoop distribution vendor, in Wikibon’s opinion (though surely Intel would be happy to take the top spot and may very well do just that!). Instead, Intel is attempting to apply pressure to existing Hadoop distribution vendors and accelerate the market. Intel chips provide the compute power behind Hadoop – regardless of distribution – so the more Hadoop deployments the more chips Intel sells. During the launch event, Intel’s Boyd Davis pointed out that for every dollar of software Intel sells, it sells a corresponding $4 in hardware.

Ultimately, Intel’s entrance into the market validates Hadoop as the real-deal and puts pressure on competitors, particularly market leader Cloudera, to close as many enterprise opportunities as possible as fast as possible.

Is SQL the future of NoSQL?

Bringing SQL-like capabilities to Hadoop has been an undercurrent running through the community for years. But the trend has come to the forefront over the last three to six months. Just take walk through the expo hall at Strata Conference and you’ll come across multiple vendors that claim to open up the power of Hadoop and NoSQL data stores to business users through some application of SQL or SQL-like technology. They include Hadapt, Greenplum, Concurrent, Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Teradata Aster.

These moves address an important limitation of Hadoop, as research analysts at Wikibon discussed in a recent research note:

While Hadoop has proven itself a scalable, cost effective Big Data storage and processing platform, analyzing data in Hadoop is a complex affair. It requires analysts skilled in writing MapReduce jobs in Java and who have a thorough understanding of distributed computing.

This limitation means Hadoop is not accessible to most business analysts and other skilled data professionals who are instead versed in SQL to access and analyze data stored in relational databases. To overcome this limitation, most Hadoop early adopters wishing to provide business analysts access to data in Hadoop rely on connectors to move data between Hadoop and existing relational database systems.

Similarly, NoSQL data stores were developed to support web-scale applications and overcome the scaling challenges associated with relational databases. With some important exceptions, many NoSQL databases, like Hadoop, are not easily accessible to traditional developers or business users.

By applying SQL and SQL-like interfaces and tools to Hadoop and NoSQL, these vendors are attempting to democratize Big Data and make it accessible to business users.

It’s a somewhat ironic development, as Co-Chair of Strata Conference Alistair Croll pointed out during the Startup Showcase here on Tuesday evening. Said Croll, “Who knew the future of NoSQL was SQL?”

Original SiliconANGLE and Wikibon Big Data Content

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Here’s more SiliconANGLE and Wikibon original Big Data content orbiting around this exciting Big Data trend and the successful Strata Conference.

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SiliconANGLE Big Data Coverage

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• Near Real-time Results in Fast Data Update + Analysis: ScaleOut’s Recipe for Success
• EA Looks to Big Data to Level Up the Video Game Industry
• Center of Value Shifting from Software to Data, Says Tim O’Reilly
•  The 3 Best Places to Be in the Big Data Market
• Google Still Hails the Browser as the Future: Merged Cloud + Services for All
•  Extreme Weather Forecasting With Big Data
• DDN Sits Atop the Scalability Spectrum, Making Hadoop Work for “Storage People”
• How Big Data Revolutionized the Finance Industry: From Wall Street to the iPhone
• Big Data PaaS Provider Continuuity Announces Developer Suite and Sandbox

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Wikibon Big Data Research

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Select Big Data Interviews – SiliconANGLE.tv – theCUBE

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