Business Analytic Application Comes to Hadoop

There’s no doubt that one of the bigger opportunities to emerge for solution providers in the channel in 2010 had been Hadoop.  The benefit of an open source data framework such as Hadoop is that it provides a cost-effective way to manipulate  “Big Data.”

Rather than having to buy data warehousing appliances  to manipulate large amounts of data, Hadoop lets customers work with large amounts of data on lower cost servers. Hadoop, of course, is slower than a dedicated data warehouse appliance.

But a lot of customers are just looking for an inexpensive way to work with larger sets of data so they can have more confidence in the conclusions they come. Right now, most analysis is done using a relatively small sample of data. By working with larger sets of data, analysts can have more confidence in their results.

The problem with Hadoop for many organizations is that its native interface is MapReduce. In the business world, SQL is still king. To address this issue Karmasphere has launched Karmasphere Analyst, a tool that allows business analysts to use SQL to query a variety of Hadoop implementations.

According to Karmasphere CEO Martin Hall, a tool specifically designed for business analysts has been the missing Hadoop link.