Michael Hausenblas at NoSQL Matters 2013 does a great lecture on Apache Drill.
Projects “beta” for Apache Drill by second quarter and GA by end of year.
From the rationale:
There is a strong need in the market for low-latency interactive analysis of large-scale datasets, including nested data (eg, JSON, Avro, Protocol Buffers). This need was identified by Google and addressed internally with a system called Dremel.
How do you handle ad hoc exploration of data sets as part of planning a topic map?
Being able to “test” merging against data prior to implementation sounds like a good idea.