MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the top-ranked distribution for Apache Hadoop that integrates web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database capabilities, today announced the availability of Apache Drill 1.2 in its Distribution as well as a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution. Customers and partners can now more quickly leverage Drill to get fast business insights from all their data in Hadoop and other sources. In addition, MapR also released a comprehensive SQL-based test framework to the open source community.

Interest and adoption of Drill, which was recently recognized as one of the best in open source big data technologies, continues to grow since its general availability earlier this year. Thousands of users have downloaded Drill and numerous organizations have it in production, interactively analyzing up to PBs of data. Additionally, over 4,000 analysts, BI architects and developers have completed Drill training courses provided by the free Hadoop On-Demand Training program from MapR.

“Capturing and analyzing digital and social media data continues to be highly valuable when engaging with customers,” said Donna Belanger, head of partner tools, Harte Hanks.  “However, data formats vary greatly and the amount of information grows at an extremely fast pace.  Without the need for complex data modeling, Apache Drill simplifies the process and enables us to shorten the time it takes to explore these semi-structured and structured data sources for our clients and help them rapidly identify actionable insights.”

Version 1.2 of Apache Drill, which is now available in the MapR Distribution, offers extended SQL analytics functionality, superior performance, deeper Hive integration, and improvements in overall enterprise manageability.  Highlights include:

  • Advanced SQL Functions: Drill 1.2 continues to deliver on the promise of ANSI-SQL and help companies reuse existing investments in BI/analytic tools, with the addition of SQL-compliant analytical and window functions. New functions include Lead, Lag, First Value, and Last Value, in addition to the ranking and a variety of aggregated window functions delivered in Drill 1.1.
  • High Performance: Drill 1.2 offers superior performance and scale for interactive workloads. Some of the capabilities include a new metadata cache mechanism which speeds up queries against 1000s of files and enhanced pushdown features for a variety of datatypes to enable faster queries on HBase and MapR-DB
  • Deeper Hive Integration: Drill 1.2 extends its compatibility and performance with Hive. With deeper integration, seamless deployment of Hive for ETL and Drill for interactive queries can take place simultaneously in the same cluster, enabling companies to leverage existing investments in Hive with Drill.

“AnswerRocket empowers users with search-driven data discovery and analytics,” said Alon Goren, CEO of AnswerRocket. “When we heard about Drill’s ability to interact with NoSQL file systems, we integrated AnswerRocket with Drill and were truly impressed with the SQL Implementation, speed, and scalability provided by Drill.  When combined with AnswerRocket’s ability to translate natural language questions into SQL, Apache Drill makes self-service analytics much more easily accessible to enterprises leveraging big data.”

MapR also announced a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution, which enables companies to rapidly deploy self-service analytics on big data and discover new business insights faster.

In addition, MapR released a comprehensive SQL test framework to the open source community.  With over 10,000 tests developed over the course of several months, this framework is available for developers in the community to continue to maintain the enterprise quality of the Apache Drill project and accelerate community-driven innovation.

“Releasing the test frameworks demonstrates our continued commitment in building a strong community to drive the innovation and quality of the Apache Drill OSS project,” said Neeraja Rentachintala, director, product management, MapR Technologies. “Drill users are getting value from their relational structured data in Hadoop as well as enabling a broader set of users in an organization to leverage new types of semi-structured data sources such as JSON. As the only schema-free SQL engine for big data, Drill brings unprecedented flexibility and performance, rapid time to insights, granular security, scale in all dimensions and integration with existing tools.”