Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 22, 2013

Impala v Hive

Filed under: Cloudera,Hive,Impala — Patrick Durusau @ 9:12 pm

Impala v Hive by Mike Olson.

From the post:

We introduced Cloudera Impala more than a year ago. It was a good launch for us — it made our platform better in ways that mattered to our customers, and it’s allowed us to win business that was previously unavailable because earlier products simply couldn’t tackle interactive SQL workloads.

As a side effect, though, that launch ignited fierce competition among vendors for SQL market share in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, with claims and counter-claims flying. Chest-beating on performance abounds (and we like our numbers pretty well), but I want to approach the matter from a different direction here.

I get asked all the time about Cloudera’s decision to develop Impala from the ground up as a new project, rather than improving the existing Apache Hive project. If there’s existing code, the thinking goes, surely it’s best to start there — right?

Well, no. We thought long and hard about it, and we concluded that the best thing to do was to create a new open source project, designed on different principles from Hive. Impala is that system. Our experiences over the last year increase our conviction on that strategy.

Let me walk you through our thinking.

Mike makes a very good argument for building Impala.

Whether you agree with it or not, it centers on requirements and users.

I won’t preempt his argument here but suffice it to say that Cloudera saw the need for robust SQL support over Hadoop data stores and estimated user demand for a language like SQL versus a newer language like Pig.

Personally I found it refreshing for someone to explicitly consider user habits as opposed to a “…users need to learn the right way (my way) to query/store/annotate data…” type approach.

You know the outcome, now go read the reasons Cloudera made the decisions it did.

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