MapR Open Distribution for Hadoop Released

MapR Technologies, who distributes Apache Hadoop, announced the release of a fully compliant ODBC 3.52 driver as part of the MapR Distribution, which allows users to leverage hundreds of commercial and open source SQL-based tools, such as query builders and BI applications including Excel, Tableau, MicroStrategy and a variety of 100 percent open source SQL tools, such as Kaimon.

“Unlike other Hadoop distributions, there is no need to deploy agents or specialized connectors to get data into and out of a Hadoop cluster,” said Tomer Shiran, director of product management at MapR Technologies.  “MapR opens up Hadoop by allowing users to leverage a broad array of standard commands, tools and applications.”

MapR, based in San Jose, CA, assists business users in managing and analyzing Big Data. The award-winning MapR Distribution brings dependability, speed and ease-of-use to Hadoop, an open-source software which enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. Many Web-scale companies such as Facebook leverage Hadoop to process their extremely large data.

Also, MapR recently joined in the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) as a solution provider member of the Data Services Workgroup to define enterprise requirements to address interoperability, security and manageability of Big Data frameworks.

MapR asserts that it is the most open distribution for Hadoop. "An important dimension for any Big Data framework is the degree of openness with respect to data access," according to MapR Technologies' release. "The standard Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) access announced today allows SQL-based applications to run SQL queries (via Hive) and provides open database access through a standard API. This joins the standard file access support provided by MapR’s support for the complete NFS protocol allowing any file-based application to read/write data directly from/to a MapR cluster."