JNBridge, (www.jnbridge.com), a leading provider of interoperability tools that connect the Java and .NET Frameworks both on the ground and in the cloud, today announced a new JNBridge Lab which for the first time allows developers to build an Excel add-in for Hadoop HBase.  JNBridge’s latest lab provides users with a simple Excel front-end to HBase MapReduce allowing a user to view HBase tables and execute MapReduce projects.

Hadoop enables businesses to quickly analyze very large data sets. Hadoop can reduce large amounts of data into a meaningful answer in a short amount of time. However, without understanding the shape of the complex data, developers run the risk of not clearly understanding data from its point of origin. Tools that aid data investigation provide a means to quickly view, sort, filter/reduce and represent data, making it possible to quickly find and understand patterns, trends and relationships. Microsoft Excel has always been the ubiquitous off-the-shelf tool for data analysis and it makes a ready-to-go front end for Hadoop. Excel can continue to be leveraged using the latest lab from JNBridge.

“Most Hadoop users run Hadoop on Linux, but many also want to integrate .NET and other Microsoft technologies, and we’ve been supporting them in our series of labs,” explained Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge. “This latest JNBridge lab extends this support by allowing users to continue to run the analyses on Linux while viewing the results with a familiar Excel front end. By supporting the HBase client API, users can get finer-grained control over the queries that they perform than they can through other mechanisms.”

JNBridge Labs is a series of newly developed interoperability kits designed to help developers address new ways of connecting disparate technologies both on the ground and in the cloud.  The labs are distributed freely, with pointers to documentation and links to source code. They are announced on the company’s blog (http://www.jnbridge.com/jn/blog/) and are available on JNBridge’s  website (http://www.jnbridge.com/labs).