MapR Technologies, the provider of the industry’s most advanced distribution for Apache Hadoop, today announced a range of initiatives that further establishes MapR as the most open distribution for Hadoop. This announcement follows MapR’s inclusion in the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) as a solution provider member of the Data Services Workgroup to define enterprise requirements to address interoperability, security and manageability of Big Data frameworks.
 
Also announced today was the release of a fully compliant ODBC 3.52 driver as part of the MapR Distribution. This allows users to leverage hundreds of commercial and open source SQL-based tools, such as query builders and BI applications including Excel, Tableau, MicroStrategy and a variety of 100% open source SQL tools, such as Kaimon.
 
Open Data Access

An important dimension for any Big Data framework is the degree of openness with respect to data access. The standard Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) access announced today allows SQL-based applications to run SQL queries (via Hive) and provides open database access through a standard API. This joins the standard file access support provided by MapR’s support for the complete NFS protocol allowing any file-based application to read/write data directly from/to a MapR cluster.
 
“Unlike other Hadoop distributions, there is no need to deploy agents or specialized connectors to get data into and out of a Hadoop cluster,” said Tomer Shiran, director of product management at MapR Technologies.  “MapR opens up Hadoop by allowing users to leverage a broad array of standard commands, tools and applications.”



Open Management

MapR also announced today full support for Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), enabling MapR to authenticate users with common authentication back-ends, including Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, Kerberos and a variety of third-party services. These capabilities augment MapR’s REST APIs, which enable functions and features of the MapR Control System to be easily integrated into third-party system management tools and dashboards. MapR also includes integration components for Nagios and Ganglia to ease integration.
 
Open Source Components

Finally, MapR announced the immediate availability of source code for the various components of the MapR distribution. MapR includes the broadest set of open source components as part of its distribution including Cascading, Flume, HBase, Hive, Pig, Mahout, Oozie, Sqoop, Whirr and ZooKeeper. All of the source code, patches and updates are available for these modules and users have the ability to make changes and enhancements while still enjoying the reliability, availability and performance of the underlying MapR storage and compute framework.