This week represents quite a milestone for Cloudera and, at least we’d like to believe, the Hadoop ecosystem at large: the general availability release of Cloudera Impala. Since we launched the Impala beta program last fall, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many of the 40+ early adopters who’ve been testing this near-real-time SQL-on-Hadoop engine in an effort to learn about their use cases and keep tabs on early experiences with the tool.

Customers running Impala today span a variety of industries, from large biotech company to online travel provider to digital advertiser to major financial institution, and each one has a unique use case for Impala. Stay tuned to learn more about their various use cases.

This week, I’d like to highlight Six3 Systems’ Wayne Wheeles (also a Champion of Big Data), who has been working with Impala to improve cyber security solutions, in particular the open source SherpaSurfing product.

On Monday April 29, Cloudera announced a strategic alliance with SAS. As the industry leader in business analytics software, SAS brings a formidable toolset to bear on the problem of extracting business value from large volumes of data.

Over the past few months, Cloudera has been hard at work along with the SAS team to integrate a number of SAS products with Apache Hadoop, delivering the ability for our customers to use these tools in their interaction with data on the Cloudera platform. In this post, we will delve into the major mechanisms that are available for connecting SAS to CDH, Cloudera’s 100% open-source distribution including Hadoop.

SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop

SAS/ACCESS provides the ability to access data sets stored in Hadoop in SAS natively. With SAS/Access to Hadoop:

In October 2012, we introduced the Impala project, at that time the first known effort to bring a modern, open source, distributed SQL query engine to Apache Hadoop. Our release of source code and a beta implementation were met with widespread acclaim — and later inspired similar efforts across the industry that now measure themselves against the Impala standard.

Today, we are proud to announce the first production drop of Impala (download here), which reflects feedback from across the user community based on multiple types of real-world workloads. Just as a refresher, the main design principle behind Impala is complete integration with the Hadoop platform (jointly utilizing a single pool of storage, metadata model, security framework, and set of system resources). This integration allows Impala users to take advantage of the time-tested cost, flexibility, and scale advantages of Hadoop for interactive SQL queries, and makes SQL a first-class Hadoop citizen alongside MapReduce and other frameworks. The net result is that all your data becomes available for interactive analysis simultaneously with all other types of processing, with no ETL delays needed.

Although the features and performance results described below are impressive, it’s important to note that they represent only a down payment toward the full promise of Impala. There is much more to come — and soon.

Features in Impala 1.0

It has been an exciting couple of days for new product announcements at Cloudera — exciting especially for me as the edges of the new platform for big data we have been talking about since Strata + Hadoop World 2012 come into focus.

Yesterday, Cloudera announced a strategic alliance with SAS. SAS is the industry leader in business analytics software, especially predictive analytics. Ninety percent of the Fortune 100 run SAS today. We have been working with SAS to make a number of its products work well with Cloudera including SAS Access, SAS Visual Analytics, and SAS High Performance Analytics (HPA). SAS HPA is an excellent case example of the future direction of Apache Hadoop as a data management platform:

We’re very happy to announce the 2.3 release of Hue, the open source Web UI that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use.

Hue 2.3 comes only two months after 2.2 but contains more than 100 improvements and fixes. In particular, two new apps were added (including an Apache Pig editor) and the query editors are now easier to use.

Here’s a video demoing the major changes:

This post was originally published via blogs.apache.org, we republish it here in a slightly modified form for your convenience:

At first glance, the Apache HBase architecture appears to follow a master/slave model where the master receives all the requests but the real work is done by the slaves. This is not actually the case, and in this article I will describe what tasks are in fact handled by the master and the slaves.

Regions and Region Servers

HBase is the Hadoop storage manager that provides low-latency random reads and writes on top of HDFS, and it can handle petabytes of data. One of the interesting capabilities in HBase is auto-sharding, which simply means that tables are dynamically distributed by the system when they become too large.

At Cloudera, there is a long and proud tradition of employees creating new open source projects intended to help fill gaps in platform functionality (in addition to hiring new employees who have done so in the past). In fact, more than a dozen ecosystem projects — including Apache Hadoop itself — were founded by Clouderans, more than can be attributed to employees of any other single company. Cloudera was also the first vendor to ship most of those projects as enterprise-ready bits inside its platform.

We thought you might be interested in meeting some of them over the next few months, in a new “Meet the Project Founder” series. It’s only appropriate that we begin with Doug Cutting himself – Cloudera’s chief architect and the quadruple-threat founder of Apache Lucene, Apache Nutch, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Avro.

What led you to your project idea(s)?

Data scientists, that peculiar mix of software engineer and statistician, are notoriously difficult to interview. One approach that I’ve used over the years is to pose a problem that requires some mixture of algorithm design and probability theory in order to come up with an answer. Here’s an example of this type of question that has been popular in Silicon Valley for a number of years: 

Say you have a stream of items of large and unknown length that we can only iterate over once. Create an algorithm that randomly chooses an item from this stream such that each item is equally likely to be selected.

The first thing to do when you find yourself confronted with such a question is to stay calm. The data scientist who is interviewing you isn’t trying to trick you by asking you to do something that is impossible. In fact, this data scientist is desperate to hire you. She is buried under a pile of analysis requests, her ETL pipeline is broken, and her machine learning model is failing to converge. Her only hope is to hire smart people such as yourself to come in and help. She wants you to succeed.

As Cloudera’s keeper of customer stories, it’s dawned on me that others might benefit from the information I’ve spent the past year collecting: the many use cases and deployment patterns for Hadoop amongst our customer base.

This week I’d like to highlight Nokia, a global company that we’re all familiar with as a large mobile phone provider, and whose Senior Director of Analytics – Amy O’Connor – will be speaking at tomorrow’s Cloudera Sessions event in Boston.

Fun fact: Nokia has been in business for more than 150 years, starting with the production of paper in the 1800s. When I first met Amy O’Connor in early 2012, she explained to me that Nokia has always been in the business of transforming resources into useful products — from paper and rubber over a century ago, to the electronics and mobile devices we’re familiar with today.

Thanks to a dazzling array of excellent proposals from across the Apache HBase community, the HBaseCon 2013 Program Committee has cooked up a great list of sessions. 

HBaseCon (hosted by Cloudera), now in its second year, is THE community event for Apache HBase contributors, developers, admins, and users. There is no better place to dive head-first into use cases, best practices, internals, and futures as well as to meet the rest of the community.