Cloudera Launches SQL-on-Hadoop Solution

Cloudera announced the general availability of Cloudera Impala, an open source, interactive SQL query engine for analyzing data stored in Hadoop clusters in real time. Cloudera worked closely with customers and open source users to develop the platform, designed from the ground-up for enterprise workloads.

"With Impala, Cloudera has decisively planted the stake in bringing the worlds of Hadoop and enterprise SQL together,"  said Tony Baer, principal analyst, Software and Enterprise Solutions at Ovum. "And it has done so in a way that addresses the expectations for performance that are taken for granted in the enterprise SQL world. For Hadoop to cross over to the enterprise, it must become a first class citizen with IT, the business and the data center. A large part of making Hadoop a first-class citizen in the enterprise is making it accessible to the large base of SQL developers and applications that already exist."

Cloudera says that adoption of its platform has been strong, with over 40 enterprise customers and open source users are using Impala today, including 37signals, Expedia, Six3 Systems, Stripe, and Trion Worlds. With its 1.0 release, Impala extends Cloudera's unified Platform for Big Data, which is designed specifically to bring different computation frameworks and applications to a single pool of data, using a common set of system resources.

With Impala, users can query data stored in HDFS and HBase directly. The framework supports all standard file and data formats available, so users can choose the format that best suits their use case. The Impala framework is optimized for use with CDH, Cloudera's 100-percent open source distribution of Hadoop and related applications.

"Impala represents a major advance for Cloudera and the Hadoop ecosystem as a whole,"  said Mike Olson, CEO at Cloudera. "Cloudera was first to recognize that Apache Hadoop would be a catalyst for business transformation in the 21st century. We have worked tirelessly to support the rapid development of the platform to form a viable and open enterprise solution, with a rich and vibrant ecosystem to support it. We will continue to be a primary driver behind the evolution of a 100-percent open source Hadoop platform by setting a high bar that pushes the boundaries of what's possible to exceed the high expectations of our enterprise customers."