Thousands of users adopt Open Source, enterprise-grade, schema-free SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop®, NoSQL and Cloud storage

Forest Hill, MD --19 May 2015-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache™ Drill™ 1.0, the schema-free SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop®, NoSQL and Cloud storage.

"The production-ready 1.0 release represents a significant milestone for the Drill project," said Tomer Shiran, member of the Apache Drill Project Management Committee. "It is the outcome of almost three years of development involving dozens of engineers from numerous companies. Apache Drill's flexibility and ease-of-use have attracted thousands of users, and the enterprise-grade reliability, security and performance in the 1.0 release will further accelerate adoption."

With the exponential growth of data in recent years, and the shift towards rapid application development, new data is increasingly being stored in non-relational, schema-free datastores including Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud storage. Apache Drill revolutionizes data exploration and analytics by enabling analysts, business users, data scientists and developers to explore and analyze this data without sacrificing the flexibility and agility offered by these datastores. Drill processes the data in-situ without requiring users to define schemas or transform data.

"Drill introduces the JSON document model to the world of SQL-based analytics and BI" said Jacques Nadeau, Vice President of Apache Drill. "This enables users to query fixed-schema, evolving-schema and schema-free data stored in a variety of formats and datastores. The architecture of relational query engines and databases is built on the assumption that all data has a simple and static structure that’s known in advance, and this 40-year-old assumption is simply no longer valid. We designed Drill from the ground up to address the new reality.”

Apache Drill's architecture is unique in many ways. It is the only columnar execution engine that supports complex and schema-free data, and the only execution engine that performs data-driven query compilation (and re-compilation, also known as schema discovery) during query execution. These unique capabilities enable Drill to achieve record-breaking performance with the flexibility offered by the JSON document model.

The business intelligence (BI) partner ecosystem is embracing the power of Apache Drill. Organizations such as Information Builders, JReport (Jinfonet Software), MicroStrategy, Qlik®, Simba, Tableau, and TIBCO, are working closely with the Drill community to interoperate BI tools with Drill through standard ODBC and JDBC connectivity. This collaboration enables end users to explore data by leveraging sophisticated visualization tools and advanced analytics.

"We've been using Apache Drill for the past six months," said Andrew Hamilton, CTO of Cardlytics. "Its ease of deployment and use along with its ability to quickly process trillions of records has made it an invaluable tool inside Cardlytics. Queries that were previously insurmountable are now common occurrence. Congratulations to the Drill community on this momentous occasion."

"Drill's columnar execution engine and optimizer take full advantage of Apache Parquet's columnar storage to achieve maximum performance," said Julien Le Dem, Technical Lead of Analytics Data Pipeline at Twitter and Vice President of Apache Parquet. "The Drill team has been a key contributor to the Parquet project, including recent enhancements to Parquet types and vectorization. The Drill team’s involvement in the Parquet community is instrumental in driving the standard."

"Apache Drill 1.0 raises the bar for secure, reliable and scalable SQL-on-Hadoop," said Piyush Bhargava, distinguished engineer, IT, Cisco Systems. "Because Drill integrates with existing data virtualization and visualization tools, we expect it will improve adoption of self-service data exploration and large-scale BI queries on our advanced Hadoop platform at Cisco."

"MicroStrategy recognized early on the value of Apache Drill and is one of the first analytic platforms to certify Drill," said Tim Lang, senior executive vice president and chief technology officer at MicroStrategy Incorporated. "Because Drill is designed to be used with a minimal learning curve, it opens up more complex data sets to the end user who can immediately visualize and analyze new information using MicroStrategy’s advanced capabilities."

"Apache Drill closes a gap around self-service SQL queries in Hadoop, especially on complex, dynamic NoSQL data types," said Mike Foster, Strategic Alliances Technology Officer at Qlik. "Drill's performance advantages for Hadoop data access, combined with the Qlik associative experience, enables our customers to continue discovering business value from a wide range of data. Congratulations to the Apache Drill community."

"Apache Drill empowers people to access data that is traditionally difficult to work with," said Jeff Feng, product manager, Tableau. "Direct access within a centralized data repository and without pre-generating metadata definitions encourages data democracy which is essential for data-driven organizations. Additionally, Drill's instant and secure access to complex data formats, such as JSON, opens up extended analytical opportunities."

"Congratulations to the Apache Drill community on the availability of 1.0," said Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President, Products and Cloud at TIBCO. "Drill promises to bring low-latency access to data stored in Hadoop and HBase via standard SQL semantics. This innovation is in line with the value of Fast Data analysis, which TIBCO customers welcome and appreciate."

"The community's accomplishment is a testament to The Apache Software Foundation's ability to bring together diverse companies to work towards a common goal. None of this would have been possible without the contribution of engineers with advanced degrees and experience in relational databases, data warehousing, MPP, query optimization, Hadoop and NoSQL," added Nadeau. "Our community's strength is what will solidify Apache Drill as a key data technology for the next decade. We welcome interested individuals to learn more about Drill by joining the community's mailing lists, attending upcoming talks by Drill code committers at various conferences including Hadoop Summit, NoSQL Now, Hadoop World, or at a local Apache Drill MeetUp."

Availability and Oversight Apache Drill 1.0 is available immediately as a free download from http://drill.apache.org/download/. Documentation is available at http://drill.apache.org/docs/. As with all Apache products, Apache Drill software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For ways to become involved with Apache Drill, visit http://drill.apache.org/ and @ApacheDrill on Twitter.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 500 individual Members and 4,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

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