Tableau Software, a provider of business intelligence software, and Cloudera Inc., a provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, have announced integration between the two companies that provides enterprises with capabilities to more easily extract business insights from their big data without needing the specific technical skills typically required to operate Hadoop.
Tableau has developed a Certified Cloudera Connector that is licensed to work with Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH). The new connector is part of the Tableau 7.0 release.
With the connector, Tableau users are able to access and analyze data stored in Hadoop through Hive and the new Cloudera connector. According to the vendors, Tableau's business intelligence platform combined with Cloudera's big data platform enables organizations to quickly and easily build interactive visualizations and dashboards that facilitate access and understanding of their data.
While Hadoop has become very interesting to organizations because they can cost effectively store large quantities of data, "the downside with Hadoop is that you basically have to be a programmer, and have some programming skills, to be able to access the data," Dan Jewett, vice president of Product Management at Tableau, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "With Hadoop, came the MapReduce programming paradigm but you still had to have some engineering skills to be able to write those programs to access the data," he notes.
"What Tableau is now starting to make available to people is very friendly, accessible, business-user-centered products that can reach through and get at all the atomic data that is being stored in the Hadoop cluster. We are opening up access to all of that wonderful atomic-level data that people are starting to store in Hadoop and we are opening up access to that to non-programmers," Jewett says. Once users are working with large amounts of atomic detail, that presents a large quantity of detail, to find trends and patterns, the "visual paradigm is the best way to do that," says Jewett. The Cloudera Connector for Tableau provides easy ad hoc visualization so users can see the trends, patterns, and outliers in their data stores in Hadoop and can use that to narrow down their discovery without needing any special configuration, he explains.
For more information about Tableau, go to www.tableausoftware.com/trial.
For information about Cloudera, go to www.cloudera.com.