Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Apache Drill 1.0 by MapR Hits General Availability 

 MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the distribution for Apache Hadoop, today announced general availability of Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR Distribution. Drill delivers self-service SQL analytics without requiring pre-defined schema definitions, 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.

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.

“Information Builders is pleased to continue to support MapR and their new Drill capabilities,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO, Information Builders. “Our software fuels proactive business analytics using more raw complex/multi-structured data at a significantly low cost and rapid time to market while being completely extensible for future MapR innovations, IT architecture, and organizational growth.”

Customers see efficiencies from the analytics.

“Cardlytics is innovating how enterprises can leverage consumer spend behavior,” said Michael Fabacher, VP data architecture/development, Cardlytics. “Apache Drill will enable us to efficiently analyze large amounts of data quickly and provide perishable relevant information to our customers in massive volumes.  Apache Drill on the MapR Distribution helps to deliver those capabilities cost effectively on our Hadoop platform, along with the scale and performance we require for our growing data insights capabilities.”

Added Will Duckworth, SVP, technology, comScore: “We are very excited about the capabilities that Drill will bring into the Hadoop ecosystem.  Having the ability to process trillions of rows of structured and unstructured data with low latency response times will allow us to provide new and exciting analytics to our clients when they need them."

DRILL RESOURCES

  • Take advantage of free MapR On-Demand Hadoop training to get started on Drill
  • To learn more about the Drill 1.0 product and its key features, visit here
    • To experience Drill in action by downloading the software or to find more information, visit here.

Drill graduated to become an Apache top-level project in Dec 2014.  Apache Drill 1.0 with the MapR Distribution including Hadoop is currently available.

About the author: Alison Diana

Managing editor of Enterprise Technology. I've been covering tech and business for many years, for publications such as InformationWeek, Baseline Magazine, and Florida Today. A native Brit and longtime Yankees fan, I live with my husband, daughter, and two cats on the Space Coast in Florida.

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