Pivotal Software Inc. has made good on a promise it made earlier this year to open-source its HAWQ SQL engine for Hadoop, and it’s also done the same for its MADlib machine learning technology.

As of today, the development of both HAWQ and MADlib will now fall under The Apache Software Foundation, although Pivotal will still lead the development of both projects.

Pivotal made its promise to open-source HAWQ back in February of this year, at the same time as it became one of the founding members of the controversial Open Data Platform (ODP) – an initiative formed to standardize on Hadoop that’s backed by Hortonworks Inc., IBM and many other tech heavyweights, but notably not rival Hadoop firms Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.

At the time the ODP was formed, Pivotal announced it was open-sourcing its Greenplum data warehousing system, and promised to do the same for HAWQ and GemFire later in the year. Pivotal followed up by releasing GemFire’s source code under the name “Project Geode” just two months later, and now by open-sourcing HAWQ, the company has fulfilled all of its promises.

Pivotal said in a press release the move was all about reaffirming its commitment to open-source, something it says is imperative if businesses are to have easy access to powerful analytics tools and create new software-driven experiences.

“We strongly believe our HAWQ and MADlib technologies, as Apache Software Foundation incubation projects, bring unprecedented SQL processing capabilities and know-how to Hadoop developers and users,” said Gavin Sherry, Vice President and CTO, Data, Pivotal. “We’re excited and humbled at the prospect of collaborating closely, in the open, with many of the leading minds in data processing systems today.”

By open-sourcing Apache HAWQ, which is now an incubator project, enterprises will be able to harness the power of a parallel data processing technology that’s already proven itself in some of the most demanding, high-throughput IT environments around, Pivotal said.

HAWQ was first released as a proprietary software by Pivotal in 2013. The company built the software leveraging its previous experience in designing Greenplum and PostgreSQL to come up with a solution for performing advanced SQL analytics on Hadoop.

As well as HAWQ, Pivotal has also open-sourced its MADlib machine learning library. MADlib’s new open-source status is only fitting considering how Pivotal developed the software in tandem with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Florida and several of its customers. Apache MADlib is a powerful collection of scale out, parallel machine learning algorithms that integrate seamlessly with HAWQ, and has seen widespread use in the finance, automotive, media, telecommunications and transport industries.

Pivotal said in its statement that it’s planning to continue offering commercial distributions of both Apache HAWQ and Apache MADlib via the Pivotal Big Data Suite. In addition, Pivotal will continue to lead the development of both platforms.

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