Hadoop Benefits from Cloudera's Real Time Query Engine; Impala

To help companies make use of big data, an enterprise software company that provides Apache Hadoop-based software, support and services, Cloudera, on October 24, announced the launch of Impala, a real-time query engine for Hadoop.

Within one scalable system, the platform allows batch and real-time operations to be performed on any type of data, unstructured and structured. Hadoop allows applications to work with thousands of computation-independent computers and petabytes of data and is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.

Impala is an Apache-licensed query engine for data stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), a scalable, portable file system written in Java for the Hadoop framework and HBase, a non-relational, distributed database currently serving several data-driven websites, such as Facebook's (News - Alert) Messaging Platform. The management and support capabilities needed for Impala are provided by Cloudera Enterprise (Real-time Query) RTQ.

"Mainstream enterprise adoption of Hadoop will inevitably raise expectations. Enterprises have grown accustomed to interactive querying and on-the-spot analytics with their existing data warehousing and BI infrastructures and will expect no less of Hadoop," Ovum (News - Alert) Principal Analyst Tony Baer said in a statement.

He added that Cloudera is striving to level the playing field in performance and accessibility with massively parallel SQL platforms with a real-time query capability powered by its new Impala engine.

According to a recent Cloudera survey of more than 100 customers, more than 70 percent of enterprises surveyed said that as a chief business imperative, they are actively exploring how to extract value from big data and the survey found operational IT efficiency and competitive advantage as the main business drivers for adopting the Hadoop platform. However, 78 percent of customers said they need faster queries on Hadoop.

Impala offers interactive queries expressed in industry-standard SQL and following a flexible data model, it was designed in a way so it can work over more complex data than a data warehouse.