To allow companies to simplify development and management of highly advanced interactive analytic applications that process extremely large data volumes, Aster Data has announced Aster Data nCluster 4.5. With the volume of data in enterprises doubling every 18 months, rich and extremely fast analysis on tens and hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data has become a necessity. Aster Data's previous releases made "big data" analytics possible by allowing analytic applications to run inside Aster Data's massively parallel database. Now, Jon Bock, director of product marketing for Aster Data, tells 5 minute Briefing, "We are taking the next step in that we are putting together an environment and toolset to make it significantly easier to develop those applications, to test them, and then to manage them."
Aster Data had integrated MapReduce with SQL in its database. Now, with Aster Data nCluster 4.5, the company aims to deliver a comprehensive platform for easy development, deployment, and management of MapReduce-enabled analytic applications.
A key new feature of nCluster 4.5 is Aster Data Developer Express, which provides an integrated visual environment for developing analytic applications with SQL and MapReduce, and eases development and deployment of MapReduce-enabled applications. "This is the first integrated visual development environment we have seen that addresses that part of developing analytic applications," notes Bock. In the past, there were development environments for just SQL, however, MapReduce was something for which there were not a lot of development tools, Bock says, explaining, "It was typically done only by specialized programmers who had a lot of experience in that specific type of programming." Aster Data Developer Express makes it easy to develop, validate, and deploy big data applications through integration with the popular Eclipse IDE; includes wizards that automate common elements of analytic application development; provides a desktop testing environment for local development and testing; and enables one-click push down of analytic applications into Aster Data's nCluster database so applications run inside the database eliminating the latency associated with massive data movement.
Additionally, with this release, Aster Data Analytic Foundation accelerates the development of rich analytics with a suite of reusable building blocks for common analytic functions. These ready-to-use modules have been optimized to take advantage of the power of Aster Data's SQL-MapReduce framework for fast analytics, and represent what Aster Data believes is the industry's first suite of functions optimized for MapReduce. Examples of these functions include advanced time-series analysis, market basket analysis for advanced analytics in retail, and a range of statistical analysis functions relevant to many industries, in particular financial services companies.
nCluster 4.5 also provides an enhanced management console that makes it easy to monitor and manage big data and advanced analytic applications; supports solid-state storage for faster data access; and adds a new data loader that accelerates the movement of data into nCluster.
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