AtScale, which offers a self-service Business Intelligence (BI) platform for Hadoop, is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to run Big Data analytics atop of their Hadoop clusters.

Hadoop has gained a lot of traction among enterprises in recent years, with many companies hopeful that it can power their BI operations and deliver useful analytics they can work with. But one problem with Hadoop is that it’s incredibly difficult to enable interactive queries on Hadoop with regular BI tools, which companies have often invested a lot of money in.

The problem with Hadoop is that although its extremely flexible and scalable, it wasn’t designed to support interactive queries from multiple BI tools. As such, companies have had to rely on complex workarounds such as data indexing to overcome these failings. Additionally, those that wish to connect BI tools to their data in Hadoop have had to use customer drivers for each tool. For example, Tableau Software requires SQL, while Excel needs MDX to connect to Hadoop. To make matters worse, many organizations use multiple BI tools.

To try and solve this problem once and for all, AtScale has introduced a new Hybrid Query Service that allows enterprises to support MDX and SQL natively, without needing to add custom drivers or new clients to their end-user machines. The new service is part of the newly released AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0, which AtScale claims is the only platform capable of supporting these standards.

“Whether it’s an SQL query or an MDX query, we’re converting that to the exact same SQL-on-Hadoop query underneath,” said Bruno Aziza, CMO of AtScale, to CIO.com.

AtScale’s Hybrid Query Service works by creating virtual cubes that transform Hadoop into a high-performance OLAP server using what the company calls “BI Server Impersonation” that represents the virtual cube as a Hive server. As such, the service allows for MDX and SQL to be supported natively.

The new service is the most exciting addition to AtScale’s Intelligence Platform, which also comes with a bunch of new security and governance features.

The AtScale Hybrid Query Services is part of AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0 also announced on Tuesday. The 4.0 version adds a host of features to meet enterprise requirements for security and governance.

“With the release of Version 4.0, AtScale offers the most comprehensive security controls available in the BI-on-Hadoop category,” said Josh Klahr, Vice President of Product Management at AtScale. “Enterprises attempting to turn Hadoop into a true analytical data warehouse face lagging query performance, security issues and a frustrating experience for business users. With this release, AtScale eradicates these issues and provides a seamless and secure experience that is second to none.”

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