Composite Software has released the Composite Data Virtualization Platform 6.2 SP3. This release really has four elements, Robert Eve, executive vice president of marketing, Composite, tells 5 Minute Briefing. It updates the Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Distribution of Hadoop big data integrations through the HiveServer2 interface, and then fourth, provides new access to Cloudera CDH through Impala.
According to Composite, the emergence of big data has resulted in analytic opportunities for business innovation, customer retention and profit growth, but the big data skills shortage is a bottleneck that hinders organizations as they move from early big data experiments into enterprise scale adoption. “The key problem with big data is that there are not enough people that are skilled at the big data tools to use them effectively,” Eve notes.
This new release builds on big data analytics capabilities previously announced by Composite. The company had announced support for Hadoop integration with the 6 release of its Data Virtualization Platform in June 2011. Composite 6 provided a standardized SQL approach to augment specialized MapReduce coding of Hadoop queries. By simplifying integration of Hadoop data, it allowed organizations to extend their analytics and BI to include “big data” sources as well as enterprise, cloud and other data sources. Then, with Composite 6.1 in February 2012, Composite provided the ability for MapReduce programs to easily query Composite as a data source thus allowing enterprises to extend MapReduce analyses beyond Hadoop stores to include diverse enterprise data managed by Composite. The new release aims to help organizations further accelerate their big data analytics efforts.
“Over the past years, we have extended the number of options for Hadoop as Hadoop is extended. With this release, we support Hortonworks, Cloudera, and Apache distributions of Hadoop, so now we can integrate all of those through Hive, and then, there is a new SQL-like language from Cloudera called Impala and we now support that as well,” says Eve. “Therefore, you can write standard SQL queries to Composite views, and then Composite will resolve those and access that data from the Hadoop data stores. We actually convert it into a MapReduce program that interacts with the database - and pulls that data.”
The new capabilities were customer-driven, says Eve, explaining that existing customers who might be using Composite's Data Virtualization Platform for integrating Teradata and SAP data with external data sources, are now coming to Composite and seeking to integrate their Hadoop data, as well.
For more information about the new release, go to Composite Software website at www.compositesw.com.