MapR Technologies, Inc. marked a milestone of sorts today with the announcement that it is shipping Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR distribution of the Hadoop Big Data platform. The company has been shipping earlier versions of Drill, for which it has been the primary developer for the past three years, since last September, but today’s release coincides with the formal announcement of the release of the 1.0 version by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Drill is the first schema-free SQL engine for Big Data, meaning that it enables users to query multiple data sources without requiring the pre-defined schema definitions that tax data administrators. With a highly scalable architecture, it’s expected to be a particularly useful tool as the Internet of Things (IoT) arrives, bringing with it oceans of largely unstructured data in a variety of file formats. Drill works with HDFS, Hive, HBase; NoSQL data from MongoDB, REST APIs and other sources, as well as JSON files with nested structures.

ASF said Drill is “the only columnar execution engine that supports complex and schema-free data, and the only execution engine that performs data-driven query compilation (and re-compilation, also known as schema discovery) during query execution.”

MapR said it developed Drill in recognition of the fact that Big Data isn’t a forklift migration. New distributed file systems like Hadoop will co-exist with legacy warehouses for many years, with SQL being the preferred query language. MapR positions itself as the ROI leader in Big Data, so legacy integration is an important stake in the ground. At the same time Drill addresses the growing need for ad hoc end-user access that is being met by visualization engines like Tableau Software, Inc.’s Tableau. .

It’s estimated that more than 90% of data stored on computers is unstructured, and that percentage continues to grow. “The architecture of relational query engines and databases is built on the assumption that all data has a simple and static structure that’s known in advance, and this 40-year-old assumption is simply no longer valid,” said Jacques Nadeau, Vice President of Apache Drill, in an ASF press release. “We designed Drill from the ground up to address the new reality.”

Drill’s other distinguishing feature is fine-grained security that enables IT organizations to limit access at the column and row level Drill views. This enables different portions of the same file to be used by multiple users, each with a different set of permissions. There is no need for a separate permission repository.

MapR also released a list of endorsements from partner companies that are supporting Drill, including Information Builders, Inc., MicroStrategy, Inc., Jinfonet Software, Inc., Simba Technologies, Inc. and SAP SE.