Cloudera, Quest to link Hadoop to Oracle

Cloudera and Quest Software are unveiling on Monday plans to build software to connect the popular Hadoop data management platform to Oracle databases.

Code-named “Ora-Oop,” the free software will accommodate users who need to link relational data in Oracle databases with the data handled in Hadoop, which serves as a large-scale storage and computation engine, said Michael Olson, Cloudera CEO.

“We see enormous interest in Hadoop at large enterprises,” Olson said. “They’re collecting more data from more places than ever before,” such as weblogs and user-generated content, he said.

Hadoop deals with structured and complex data, such as blogs, images, and documents that could not be easily put into a relational database, he said. Cloudera offers Hadoop-based software and services while Quest has provided third-party tools for Oracle.

“One of the issues we see when we talk to enterprise users is they already have substantial investments in Oracle,” Olson said. Enterprises may need to link such data as information about users, which is in a relational database, with information that users create, such as what searches they create, said Olson.

Ora-Oop will work with the Cloudera distribution of Apache Hadoop.

Ora-Oop is to feature an interface allowing bidirectional data transfer between Oracle databases and Hadoop. Ora-Oop will complement the Cloudera-authored Sqoop open source tool for importing data from relational databases to Hadoop. While Ora-Oop will provide high-connectivity throughput to Oracle databases based on Oracle primitives, Sqoop leverages generic SQL. Ora-Oop, though, will leverage the Sqoop framework.

Asked if Cloudera had plans to offer connectivity between Hadoop and other databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Olson said the company had nothing to announce at the moment. But the company hopes to work on more projects with Quest, he said.

Ora-Oop will be available from both Cloudera Quest in the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. Quest, meanwhile, will make the Cloudera Hadoop distribution available on the Quest Website.

Cloudera and Quest plan product bundling and joint commercial support for the Ora-Oop. Possible commercial products that could be built around Ora-Oop could be technology to report on data handled by Ora-Oop, according to Christian Hasker, director of product management at Quest.

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