Hadapt was the lucky company that snagged the Audience Choice award at the gathering for its use of SQL and Hadoop to offer a single, unified system for data analytics. Dr. Daniel Abadi, the chief scientist and co-founder of Hadapt, was more than happy to elaborate, stopping by theCube with SiliconAngle founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante at Strata + Hadoop World this week.

The data scientist says that Hadapt is leveraging the best of two worlds: the three decades worth of know-how that accumulated behind SQL, and the fresher approach of the still maturing Hadoop community. The end result is a platform that can crunch both structured and unstructured data while eliminating the need for connectors.

After providing a bit of background about his tenure at Yale and his work around row stores (which eventually led to the creation of Vertica), Dr. Abadi draws a timeline of analytical technology.

The relational databases that were implemented in the 70s and 80s as plain transactional systems took on a more knowledge-driven role in the 90s, and eventually we got to where we are today.  Dr. Abadi, however, is more interested in the future: the Doctor says that the industry is opening up to new types of data – scientific information, images and new types of text communications – and Hadapt plans on playing a key role in realizing this trend. Cloudera is following suite with Impala.

Dr. Abadi regards the recently announced real-time processing engine as a step in the right direction for Mike Olson’s company, and the segment as a whole. Up until now Cloudera focused on integrating its Hadoop distro with other vendors’ databases, but Impala disrupts that all that; functionality that previously required two clusters can now run on only one, without having to be hindered by connectors.  Abadi makes one thing very clear though: Hadapt has got the head start, and the firm has every intention of maintaining its current momentum.

See Dr. Abadi’s full interview below.