As Hadoop Advances, Solr and Other Open Source Projects Will Too
Not only did Hortonworks, which focuses on Hadoop-centric tools and services, recently announce that it has raised a whopping $100 million to scale its business, but it, along with Cloudera, is also steadily advancing the influence of a number of open source projects. As the Big Data trend spreads out, tools like the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) are wrapping in important open source components. For example, Hortonworks' new version 2.1 of HDP offers fully realized Hive interactive query capabilities for both Windows and Linux, and no extra licensing fee is being charged for LuceneWorks Solr search as part of HDP. Cloudera's platform uses Apache Solr.
We use Solr for search here on OStatic, and it is a robust open source search tool. Cloudera, which also provides support, services and training surrouonding the Hadoop Big Data platform, offers Cloudera Search, and it is powered by Apache Solr. InfoWorld has a good piece of analysis on the rise of Solr searches as Hadoop gains popularity:
"The end-user advantages of Solr, according to Will Hayes, chief product officer for LucidWorks, lie in how it makes a broader variety of Hadoop searches possible for both less technical and more technical users. Queries can be constructed in natural language ways or through more precise key/value pairs."
"If you think about the precision approach [to Hadoop data]," said Hayes, "you have to know what you're looking for. One of the things Solar will add on top of Hadoop is the ease of exploration of the data, a quick way for folks who perhaps have to do more precise access through SQL or Java APIs to explore the data in the lake, then be able to rapidly refine what they gain access to and what it means, and get better use for that data further down the road. They don't have to start with a SQL or an API call."
As I covered in this post, Cloudera has also been vocal about how Solr and Hadoop can advance together:
“As enterprise Hadoop deployments continue to mature, becoming primary repositories for more and more types of data, the center of gravity for data management continues to make a meaningful shift toward Hadoop,” said Charles Zedlewski, vice president, Products, Cloudera, in a statement. “We’ve taken what was once a relatively complicated and involved freestanding system, requiring its own hardware and operational model, and turned it into a feature of a larger, more ubiquitous open source platform – CDH. We believe this integrated approach represents a big step forward for users of both Solr and Hadoop. With Cloudera Search, Hadoop deployments can now be explored with the same ease of use and speed as a simple Google search engine query, empowering our customers to achieve rapid insights from a fully integrated platform.”
Given that Hortonworks has a new $100 million cash infusion, and Cloudera just reaped a $900 million investment, we can assume that these companies will help advance projects like Solr as they advance Hadoop. In fact, they are already doing so.