As the Enterprise adoption of Hadoop, and technologies related to it, is on the rise, it's inevitable that companies will offer various combinations and hybrids of relational and/or multidimensional databases with NoSQL data stores, MapReduce processing and various file systems.
Teradata Aster (formerly Aster Data) takes the approach of enabling MapReduce processing over a relational database. MapR enables Hadoop to work over standard Network File System (NFS) disk volumes. JustOneDB enables parallel processing over a column store. And, of course Apache Hive creates a SQL/relational abstraction layer over MapReduce, thus enabling conventional data visualization and reporting tools to work with Hadoop.
Hadapt takes a hybridizing approach that's different from the others, and I like it a lot. Instead of layering SQL/relational or MapReduce over one another, Hadapt makes them work together. Hadapt uses Hadoop, and then it co-locates a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) relational database on the cluster by putting an instance of PostgreSQL on each node. I've written before that MPP and MapReduce have a lot in common, and both should be considered Big Data technologies. Hadapt proves out this point in practical terms by implementing MPP in Hadoop's physical environment.
I spoke with Justin Borgman, Hadapt's CEO and co-founder, last week and he discussed this architecture with me, explaining that it ends up being very-cloud friendly when compared to other MPP products. He also explained how the Hadapt product began as a Yale Computer Science research project conducted by Dr. Daniel Abadi, another co-founder of the company. The company did its venture funding raise, moved from New Haven, CT to Cambridge, MA to be part of a bigger tech hub, and is now a 25-person organization. That's pretty small, but I expect it to get bigger. And big things are happening on the company's Board. Former CEO of Vertica, Christopher Lynch, was recently appointed Chairman of the Board, and Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, the former CMO of Aster Data, holds a Board spot as well. That's quite a roster of BI-Big Data unifiers.
And speaking of unifying, Hadapt announced just today that its product is now certified to run with Cloudera's Distribution Including Hadoop (CDH) as well as Cloudera's premium product, Cloudera Manager. I wrote recently about the abundance of Cloudera partnerships in the Hadoop vendor space, so it's not shocking to see that Hadapt is announcing one today as well.
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