Deal shows Big Windows is serious about Big Data and open source.
Microsoft’s latest partnership with Hortonworks is a sign that it is clearly serious about supporting Big Data, the latest hyped technology that has an ever-expanding bandwagon of vendors jumping on board. Only in this case, Big Data is real, and having Microsoft on board early is good for everyone involved.explained in a blog post. “Simply put, these contributions by Microsoft will extend Apache Hadoop to the most prolific data analysis tools in the world.”
The term “Big Data” is not unambiguous. It’s meant for giant sets of unstructured data. I’m not talking an Oracle database in neat row-and-column formats that may be a few gigs or terabytes in size. Big Data is for unstructured data – things like audio and video files and whole documents like email or image files – in the petabytes in size.
Facebook claims to be in possession of the largest Big Data repository, with its user generated content topping 30 petabytes in size. With its user base approaching one billion, many gigabytes are created every day.
Up to now, Big Data has been driven by the open source community, and while the FOSS community has done good work as stewards of the technologies that drive the Internet, we can’t ignore the big players that are interested in making a profit, either. Oracle has been a bit of a slowpoke to respond compared to Microsoft.
Hortonworks is a company spun out of Yahoo, which played a significant role in creating Hadoop, the software used to run Big Data deployments. Microsoft and Hortonworks already have a partnership to get Hadoop running on Windows Server.
Now Hortonworks and Microsoft are working on two more projects. The first is a new JavaScript framework for Hadoop that will enable JavaScript developers to perform iterative prototyping and interactive exploration of data in Hadoop.
The second is a Hive ODBC driver that extends data analysis capabilities to Excel. So you can do Big Data mining and analysis from the familiar and powerful confines of Excel via PowerPivot.
“There are many more millions of Excel and PowerPivot users that can also now derive value from Apache Hadoop using software is that already very familiar to them,” Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of Hortonworks,
Baldeschwieler also gave Microsoft credit for supporting the open source world with this project.
“They are embracing open source and giving back in a true open source tradition. Not only are they contributing code that allows Apache Hadoop to run effectively on Windows, they are also contributing a new JavaScript framework and an enhanced Hive ODBC driver,” he wrote.
