GigaOM Research Highlights Cloudera as Future SQL-on-Hadoop Market Leader

GigaOM Research, an independent research firm that provides timely in-depth analysis of disruptive technologies and emerging markets, reportedly named Cloudera as the future SQL-on-Hadoop market leader in its latest Sector RoadMap report titled, “SQL-on-Hadoop Platforms in 2013.”

The report examines four disruption vectors: read performance, mind share, flexibility and compatibility, and operational Hadoop. Findings show that the most successful companies will be the ones that can capture and analyze all data available to them to improve business decision-making.

When talking about Cloudera, the report stated that the company is certain to lead SQL-on-Hadoop market, despite the fact that at present it is a bit behind others and has a lot of code to write and test.

The company’s Impala offering is open source-based and provides fast, interactive SQL queries directly on users’ Apache Hadoop data stored in HDFS or HBase. In addition to using the same unified storage platform, Impala also uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Hue Beeswax) as Apache Hive, which in turn provides a familiar and unified platform for batch-oriented or real-time queries.

With Impala, Cloudera has effectively taken the Hadoop platform “beyond batch” for the first time in history, enabling the sophisticated, real-time analysis of unstructured or structured data.

Amr Awadallah, chief technology officer at Cloudera commented, “For Hadoop to achieve mainstream adoption in the enterprise, the need for SQL-based solutions like Impala will increase to overcome the inherent latency of MapReduce, enable interactive data analysis and provide straightforward connectivity from Hadoop to standard BI tools. This recognition further validates our vision, leadership and innovation in the SQL-on-Hadoop category and we believe that solving business challenges with open source solutions is the way forward. Cloudera continues to lead the industry in Big Data innovation.”