Hadoop distro maker MapR Technologies Inc. has rolled out a new version of its enterprise Big Data platform featuring the latest release of the open-source Apache Drill, alongside a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution.

Map R is the lead developer of Apache Drill, which is an open-source query engine built for Hadoop that offers SQL-based interactive querying across a wide range of NoSQL and relational databases. The project was updated to Apache Drill version 1.2 just last week, and has now been added to MapR’s Hadoop distro, building on the capabilities introduced when it began shipping its distro with Apache Drill 1.0 last May.

The most substantial improvement seen in Apache Drill 1.2 is support for relational databases.

“Drill now includes a JDBC storage plugin for querying relational databases (RDBMSs),” said MapR engineer Jacques Nadeau, one of the project’s lead developers, at the time of last week’s release. “Users can run SQL queries that join data between non-relational datastores (for example, MongoDB, HBase, HDFS, S3) and relational databases (for example, MySQL, Oracle). For example, a single query can join log files in HDFS with a users table in MySQL. Drill automatically pushes execution (projections, filters, partial joins, and so on) down into the RDBMS whenever possible.”

With its updated distro, MapR says that Drill 1.2 “continues to deliver on the promise of ANSI-SQL and help companies reuse existing investments in BI/analytic tools, with the addition of SQL-compliant analytical and window functions.” In addition, new functions including Lead, Lag First Value and Last Value have been added to Drill.

Besides the increased functionality on SQL analytics, MapR said Drill 1.2 offers deeper integration and better performance with the Apache Hive data warehouse software that facilitates querying and managing of large datasets residing in distributed storage. There are also new performance improvements including a new metadata cache mechanism that works to speed up queries against thousands of files. Finally, MapR also spoke of new “pushdown features” for a variety of data types that enables faster querying against the MapR-DB and HBase databases.

As well as its new distro, MapR also announced a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution aimed at enterprises wishing to deploy self-service Big Data analytics quickly to accelerate business insights. Finally, MapR also released a new open-source SQL test framework to the community, featuring over 10,000 tests its developed over the last few months.

“Releasing the test frameworks demonstrates our continued commitment in building a strong community to drive the innovation and quality of the Apache Drill OSS project,” said MapR’s Director of Product Management Neeraja Rentachintala in a statement. “Drill users are getting value from their relational structured data in Hadoop as well as enabling a broader set of users in an organization to leverage new types of semi-structured data sources such as JSON. As the only schema-free SQL engine for Big Data, Drill brings unprecedented flexibility and performance, rapid time to insights, granular security, scale in all dimensions and integration with existing tools.”

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