MapR Delivers Apache Drill 1.2 in its Hadoop Distribution

MapR Technologies which offers a popular distribution of Apache Hadoop that integrates web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database capabilities, has announced the availability of Apache Drill 1.2 in its Distribution as well as a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution. The addition of Drill 1.2 comes right on the heels of MapR adding Apache Spark to its distribution.

Drill is designed to pull fast business insights from data in Hadoop and other sources. In addition, MapR also released an 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. In fact, we interviewed MapR's Tomer Shiran (shown above) about Drill here. Thousands of users have downloaded Drill and numerous organizations have it in production, interactively analyzing up to petabytes of data. Additionally, MapR claims that over 4,000 analysts, BI architects and developers have completed Drill training courses provided by the free Hadoop On-Demand Training program that the company offers.

When we talked with Tomer Shiran, he said:

"Drill’s unique value comes from its capability to query data without requiring pre-defined schemas. This not only allows for instant querying on newly-ingested data in Hadoop but also avoids the constant maintenance associated with evolving schema requirements for diverse data types. No ETL process or DBA intervention is required at any stage of the data lifecycle.  That said, Drill can also leverage any defined schema in the Hive metastore."

“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.”

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

In addition, MapR released an 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," MapR officials said.

MapR also offers on-demand Hadoop training that can help users get started with Drill.