We’ve had a few interesting developments in Big Data this week. Hortonworks and Red Hat announced major contributions to the open-source community, an emerging search startup closed a massive round of funding, and Alteryx published a Big Data handbook for business users.

Hortonworks, the Hadoop services startup that spun off from Yahoo last year, made two submissions to the Apache Software Foundation and debuted new platform that will help it compete with Cloudera.

The company donated Tez, a Hadoop performance optimization utility, and Hadoop Gateway, an authentication engine, to Apache. It also unveiled Stinger, an ultra-fast query engine that challenges Cloudera’s Impala.

Red Hat is planning to make a contribution of its own. The open-source software vendor said it’s contributing a Hadoop plug-in for Red Hat Storage to Apache later this year, when the solution becomes generally available. The plug-in is currently in technology preview.

Over in the startup space, a company called Elasticsearch announced that it has raised $24 million from Mike Volpi of Index Futures, SV Angel and Benchmark Capital. The Dutch firm operates a real-time Big Data search engine, and offers enterprises training and advice on how to apply the technology as business solutions.

Such insights have to get to decision-makers somehow, but data scientists are few in number. That’s why Elasticsearch and Alteryx are trying to cut out the middleman by providing executives with the know-how to take their data into their own hands.

Alteryx, an Irvine-based BI vendor, published a Big Data Analytics for Dummies  guide for business users that want a maximum the return on their raw information. The book instructs the reader on how to use analytical applications, and how to integrate data-driven insights into the decision making process, among other things.

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