MapR Technologies CMO Jack Norris

Striking a strategic alliance, MapR Technologies Inc. and MongoDB Inc. bring their respective camps of the analytics movement closer together as growing enterprise adoption makes the need for pure-play vendors to provide interoperability with the rest of the data crunching stack ever more urgent. The move is highly beneficial for both firms.

As the third biggest name in the Hadoop distribution race behind Cloudera Inc. and Hortonworks Inc., MapR needs every boost it can get for its version of the batch processing framework, which is perhaps best known as the most propriety of the bunch. Both of its rivals already maintain partnerships with MongoDB, which is positioned firmly on the other side of the software distribution divide. The company provides its namesake database for free and sells premium services on the side.

Yet despite the antithetical business models, the two solutions make for a perfect match. As Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly highlighted in an April article, MongoDB is designed to provide a backend for modern web applications handling unstructured information such as text and media, the same category of workloads Hadoop has been created to process. The new revealed alliance opens the door for joint customers to combine the complementary strengths of the technologies.

Through MongoDB’s Hadoop connector, MapR users can now move unstructured information from the database into their batch clusters for deep analysis that can’t be conducted in-place. Additionally, input from the platform may now be adapted for processing in both the Hive data warehousing and Pig abstraction components for Hadoop without any complicated rewrites, which makes it easily accessible for business not versed in the project’s native MapReduce language.

Even better, the connector includes code for converting MongoDB data files into a format understood by Hadoop, functionality that allows organizations to harness the platform for cost-effective data protection. And it all works the other way around, too, which allows developers to push back insights from Hadoop to their MongoDB-powered applications to enable new features and optimize user experience.

The connector is available for download immediately from MapR’s App Gallery.

photo credit: RayMorris1 via photopin cc