Simba Technologies, the industry’s expert for Big Data connectivity, is now the de-facto standard for all the major Hadoop distributions ODBC Connectivity. MapR, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Intel, Microsoft and DataStax have all selected the Simba Apache Hive ODBC driver with SQL Connector to provide customers easy access to their data for Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics using the SQL-based application of their choice.

ODBC is the most common data interface used by BI, data analysis and reporting applications. The ODBC 3.52 specification – on which Simba’s Apache Hive ODBC Driver with SQL Connector is fully compliant – is the foundation for standards-based access. Simba Technologies developed ODBC in 1992 in collaboration with Microsoft and has been the most commonly used API for SQL ever since.

Unlike other drivers for Hive, Simba’s Apache Hive ODBC Driver with SQL Connector performs the added task of mapping standard SQL-92 to HiveQL-thereby seamlessly integrating data residing in Hadoop with any SQL-based applications. Simba’s ODBC drivers are also available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX, giving the widest support of the most common operating systems in use today.

Additionally, these ODBC drivers are based on the SimbaEngine SDK, which also has the capability to provide JDBC and ADO.net drivers for Hive and other Big Data sources. Simba will be releasing a full range of JDBC Big Data drivers for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX in the coming months.

“Simba Technologies is honoured to be partnering with these Hadoop distributions to provide powerful ODBC connections for their customers,” says George Chow, Simba Technologies CTO. “This journey began over 20 years ago when we co-developed the ODBC standard with Microsoft and we are now establishing the new standard for Hadoop ODBC connectivity with these important partnerships.”

Apache Hadoop is the next generation data platform that captures, stores and analyzes structured and unstructured data, as well as real-time streams of information, flowing throughout today’s enterprise environments. Hadoop is not natively SQL-capable, using its own Hive Query Language (HiveQL) as the basis for access and analytics.