Cloudera, the company that specializes in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, launched the public beta of Cloudera Search – reportedly the industry’s first fully integrated search engine for interactive exploration of data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Apache HBase.

Cloudera Search is like Google Search for Big Data.  This is a huge step towards the democratization of data, enabling even non-technical teams to perform interactive, natural language keyword searches and faceted navigation on data stored in Hadoop.  This is all done without having to go through additional training or having advanced programming knowledge.

So what makes Cloudera Search different from previous search offerings?

Joining Kristin Feledy in this morning’s NewsDesk is Abhishek Mehta, Founder of Tresata, to give his Breaking Analysis on what makes Cloudera Search different from existing Big Data search platforms.

“This approach of natively integrating it [Cloudera Search] with HDFS is interestingly different,” Mehta stated.  He also added that this move by Cloudera is defining the market as to what needs to be done to make the infrastructure complete.

“[T]the cohesiveness in the distribution with the variety of functions makes it very, very unique.  The other solutions work too but they don’t have the breadth of Cloudera, they don’t have the cohesiveness and the architecture that Cloudera’s bringing to market.”

For more of Mehta’s Breaking Analysis on Cloudera Search, as well as some alternative tools for searching Big Data (detailed list after the clip) check out the NewsDesk video below:

3 Big Data search platforms besides Cloudera Search

This isn’t the first time search has been implemented on Big Data.  Other’s that came before Cloudera Search include:

Solbase which is an open-source real-time search system being developed at Photobucket.com to service the over 30 million daily search requests Photobucket handles which is built on top of Lucene, Solr, and HBase.

Apache Solr which is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache LuceneTM project that features powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.

MapR introduced search capabilities with its M7 Hadoop distribution with partner LucidWorks.  LucidWorks Search software was integrated into the M7 platform to help customers building out recommendation engines for retail scenarios, fraud-detection for financial transactions and predictive applications for any number of industries easily.

photo credit: abarbier66 via photopin cc