Hadoop For Dummies

Chapter 15

The Holy Grail: Native SQL Access to Hadoop Data

In This Chapter

Seeing why SQL is important for Hadoop

Looking at SQL access and the open source Hadoop community

Evaluating proprietary SQL solutions

The NoSQL movement that has been happening over the past few years has taught two important lessons: a) Alternatives to relational databases can be a great help in solving a variety of problems and b) SQL isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the NoSQL movement is now being rebranded as NewSQL, as in, “Here’s a new technology where you can use SQL!” Even though we’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the information management field — technologies are now available that can store graphs, documents, and key/value pairs at a massive scale — the IT market is still demanding SQL support for all of it. Hadoop is no exception, and a number of companies are investing heavily to drive open source projects and proprietary solutions for SQL access to Hadoop data.

SQL’s Importance for Hadoop

There are compelling reasons that SQL has proven to be resilient. The IT industry has had 40 years of experience with SQL, since it was first developed by IBM in the early 1970s. With the increase ...