Hortonworks has announced the availability of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.6, marking the latest step in the company's connected data strategy.
HDP 2.6 offers complete support for Apache Hive 2.0, which includes LLAP functionality. LLAP's intelligent in-memory caching has the power to substantially boost the speed of interactive SQL queries.
"HDP 2.6 showcases the advantages of the open source community. Significant innovation is coming out of the Apache community, and because of our commitment to delivering an open platform, we are uniquely able to bring these value-creating capabilities to customers," said Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau. "HDP 2.6 introduces key new enterprise features and performance improvements that will benefit our customers immediately - no application re-write required."
It also introduces ACID merge functionality for the first time. This will allow customers with pre-existing Enterprise Data Warehouses to optimise them in new ways without having to reload the data every time. It also means that while performing incremental data loads, double-counted data will be recognised and flagged.
Further improvements have been made to streamline configuration, while Apache Spark 2.1 and the latest version of Zeppelin are included to help make data scientists more productive. Hortonworks' Ranger and Atlas security tools have also been improved.
As with many of its customers, Hortonworks has embraced the cloud with open arms. Following its 'cloud first' strategy, HDP 2.6 is available first on Hortonworks Data Cloud for AWS and Microsoft Azure HDInsight. It is also available on IBM Power Systems.
"There is a need to improve SQL performance and support along with Spark adoption in Hadoop related workloads," said Ovum principal analyst Tony Baer. "A key enhancement is the addition of Upsert support, which is essential for building confidence in data currency and making Hadoop BI-ready.
"Backing Hive with LLAP and Spark 2.1 should produce the kinds of service levels that BI users expect. With the 'cloud-first' strategy, Hortonworks is going where more and more new Hadoop workloads are heading."
