It’s becoming increasingly rare to see a major player in the open-source analytics ecosystem that doesn’t offer some sort of homegrown query engine. Every leading Hadoop distributor has one, as does Pivotal Software Inc.,  and now SAP SE is joining the fray too with the introduction of a new in-memory variant for Apache Spark.

Vora offers many of the same as the German software giant’s HANA database, which takes a similar approach to handling information as the analytics framework. Records are loaded into memory before processing to avoid the need for requests to be executed against the slow mechanical storage where the data is normally kept, an approach that can improve performance by several orders of magnitude. The creators of Spark claim that it’s capable of carrying out certain calculations up to a hundred times faster than the disk-based MapReduce as a result.

The fact it’s based on the equally speedy HANA enables users enables Vora to take full advantage of the analytics framework’s processing power. Ad hoc queries designed to serve a narrow purpose like tweak a problematic subset of a company’s sales data may be executed near-instantaneously in some cases, which makes it possible to quickly try different approaches until discovering what works best. And more time-consuming operations higher up on the complexity scale are likewise able to benefit from the tool’s performance, meaning important business information can be delivered to executives faster.

Like the other query engines available in the Hadoop ecosystem, Vora makes it possible to carry out this work using the same structured syntax that analysts have been using to query relational systems like HANA. Besides easing the learning curve, the commonality between the offerings also makes it relatively straightforward to move data back and forth, which is a useful feature for customers that are looking to deploy the database alongside Spark. SAP has already managed to win over CenterPoint Energy Inc., a Fortune 500 utility with more than 2.3 million customers that plans to use the software in order to analyze how power from its grid is consumed.

Image via Geralt