Drawn to Scale, the four year-old startup behind Spire, is closing down. Co-founder and CEO Bradford Stephens announced the news in a recent blog post.

Spire is a real-time database solution for HBase that lets data scientists query Hadoop clusters using SQL, a relatively user-friendly language that is much easier to master than the native interface. According to Stephens, the system has been by deployed by American Express, Orange Flurry, and four other companies.

Drawn to Scale showed the market that its technology was viable in enterprise environments, raised $925,000 in seed funding and established a “great media presence against our competitors who raised 10-100x more cash,” but even that wasn’t enough to save the startup from its financial woes. Stephens disclosed the following in his post:

“Yet five days before we signed term sheets for a big A round or sold the company, we started getting hit by a series of black swans — and we just didn’t have what we needed to recover. I’ll leave the public detail at that level, but I will say that paying employees’ health insurance out of your meager savings is a powerful incentive to change course.”

Tresata founder Abhishek Mehta views Stephens’ decision to shut down Drawn to Scale as a canary in the coal mine, signaling the inevitable decline of the SQL-on-Hadoop market. “Hadoop is commoditizing the data analytics stack. SQL-on-Hadoop is a must-have feature, [but monetizing] that functionality is going to be incredibly challenging,” Mehta told SiliconAngle’s Kristin Feledy.

“The part of the data analytics stack that can be commoditized will be commoditized. A data access mechanism really can’t be sold to enterprises for money – it’s very difficult to monetize that particular functionality. Can you build a company around functionality? I guess you can, but in the Hadoop market I think the commoditization is gonna keep rising in the infrastructure tier.”

A number of companies introduced their own SQL-on-Hadoop functionality in recent months, among them Cloudera. A few weeks ago the company rolled out the first production-ready version of Impala, an open SQL engine for real-time analytics. Upon launch the platform was implemented by over 40 companies, including Expedia, Six3 Systems, Stripe, and Trion Worlds, and certified by nearly a dozen partners including IBM and SAP.

Check out the video below for the full conversation between Feledy and Mehta.