Karmasphere has introduced Karmasphere Analyst, productivity software for data professionals working with massive data sets. "Karmasphere is focused on providing software for developers and analysts to work with Big Data in Hadoop clusters. Over the past 12 months, we have been introducing products specifically focused on developers who are early adopters of Hadoop and are working on Big Data in Hadoop, but what we have heard time and time again from enterprise organizations is the need to unlock access to data in Hadoop clusters for enterprise analysts," Martin Hall, CEO of Karmasphere, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
In many lines of business, these analysts are focused on particular business functions, notes Hall. "They are not low-level programmers but they do know SQL. And, historically they have been limited by working on, for example, just samples of data or working only on structured data," he explains. "What we are doing with Karmasphere Analyst is for the first time providing desktop access through a graphical, familiar SQL interface to any size data set and type of data, whether it is structured or unstructured."
Karmasphere Analyst enables data analysts familiar with SQL to write similar queries for data stored in any Hadoop cluster from within a graphical desktop environment such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or Linux. Cloud and on-premise Hadoop clusters are supported, including Amazon Elastic MapReduce running on Amazon Web Services and Cloudera.
Karmasphere Analyst embeds the open source Apache Hive project with the Karmasphere Application Framework so that data professionals can discover schema in structured and unstructured data; create and access tables; prototype within the desktop; develop and debug SQL against any Hadoop cluster; and view query results in the visualization tool of choice with a single click. With Karmasphere Analyst, users such as technical analysts, SQL programmers, developers and DBAs can experiment with Hadoop in a familiar, graphical environment and gain the skills needed to productively use Hadoop for enterprise-class Big Data applications.
Up until now, according to Karamasphere, Apache Hive software has only been available to UNIX-based developers and analysts willing to set-up a Hadoop cluster and then install Hive. However, the company states, using Karmasphere Analyst, SQL prototyping can begin immediately because there is no initial requirement to set-up a Hadoop cluster. Hadoop data can be analyzed from a graphical desktop environment, such as Windows, instead of using the UNIX command line interface. There are many analysts who have some SQL skills, and who don't want to or need to know about the details of Hadoop, "but they want to be able to perform their business function using skills that they have already got," observes Hall. "We make that possible." For more details, go here.