MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the top-ranked distribution for Apache Hadoop, today announced the general availability of Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR Distribution.  Drill uniquely delivers self-service SQL analytics without requiring pre-defined schema definitions, dramatically reducing the time required for business analysts to explore and understand data. Drill enables interactivity with data from both legacy transactional systems and new data sources, such as Internet of things (IOT) sensors, Web click-streams, and other semi-structured data, along with support for popular business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools. Drill provides reliability and performance at Hadoop scale with integrated granular security and governance capabilities required for multi-tenant data lakes or enterprise data hubs.

“Backed by a vibrant open source community, Apache Drill combines on-the-fly schema discovery with the familiarity of ANSI SQL so analysts can interactively explore any type of data in a self-service fashion,” said Anil Gadre, senior vice president, product management, MapR Technologies. “We believe features such as the new Drill Explorer are instrumental in defining new use cases for big data and speeding time-to-value. For the first time, users do not need to know the schema before analyzing data, which enables a much larger group within organizations to derive value from their big data much faster.”

Drill enables users to perform self-service data exploration on a wide variety of data types including complex JSON formats without having to depend on IT for data preparation. The scale, cost-effectiveness and schema-free writes that Hadoop provides are now complemented by Drill’s equally scalable, cost-effective and schema-free reads, providing low-latency SQL queries and flexibility for BI and analytics.

“The availability of Apache Drill in the MapR Distribution is a major milestone for the SQL-on-Hadoop project, which is significant in delivering real-time insights from complex data formats without requiring any data preparation,” said Matt Aslett, research director, data platforms and analytics, 451 Research. “Apache Drill is an example of MapR collaborating with others as part of the Apache development process on new technologies to expand the Hadoop portfolio.”

Drill also ushers in a new era of IOT analytics. IOT data typically has large volumes of complex/semi-structured data (such as JSON) and is highly dynamic as data sources could be from hundreds and thousands of devices with each dataset potentially having a different format. Drill is designed to effectively handle such datasets.

The partner ecosystem is actively embracing the power of Apache Drill. Leading companies such as Information Builders, JReport (Jinfonet Software), MicroStrategy, Qlik, SAP, Simba, Tableau and TIBCO, are working closely with MapR and the Drill community to interoperate BI tools with Drill through standard ODBC/JDBC connectivity. This collaboration enables end users to explore data by leveraging sophisticated visualization tools and advanced analytics. Drill Explorer, which sits inside the ODBC driver, browses data available via Drill and exposes a transparent view into schema enabling seamless and extremely fast self-service data exploration on big data. With granular, easy-to-deploy, SQL views-based security, Drill provides de-centralized consumption through modern self-service BI tools, without compromising on centralized IT governance model when required.