News

AtScale BI-on-Hadoop Tool Gets Adaptive Cache

• By David Ramel
• October 19, 2015

AtScale, which does "BI on Hadoop," today announced a new version of its data platform featuring patent-pending "Adaptive Cache" technology that the company claims is an industry first.

In addition to the new cache functionality, AtScale Intelligence Platform 3.0 features enterprise security and scalability innovations, the San Mateo, Calif., company said.

"Hadoop is well known for its flexibility and its scalability," the company said in a statement. "But, when it comes to enabling interactive query from standard BI tools, this new data platform faces challenges. Up until now, available solutions to solve the Hadoop performance challenge involved data indexing, costly transformation or data movement methodologies."

Not moving the data is a key tenet of AtScale's "query-in-place" technology, which turns enterprise Hadoop clusters into scale-out OLAP servers, the company claims, letting BI users work with the data where it resides with existing BI tools such as Tableau, Microstrategy and Microsoft Excel that work with SQL or MDX.

"In this release, AtScale introduces a new patent-pending innovation that allows business users to get interactive query performance no matter what type of data they access: aggregate or atomic," the company said. "This new technology -- called 'Adaptive Cache' -- is powered through the AtScale engine and it is the first of its kind to provide speed on unlimited scale, without requiring any data movement."

AtScale said the company was founded by Big Data veterans from companies such as Yahoo, Google and Oracle. Its technology leverages virtual OLAP cubes -- called Dynamic Cubes -- that present data as simple measures and dimensions, the company said, which eliminates the need to move data around for analysis and the need for tool-specific data structures.

Thus BI users can analyze billions of rows of data directly on a Hadoop cluster, something to which customer Yellow Pages (Canada) attested. "Adaptive Cache is possibly one of the most meaningful breakthroughs in this space," AtScale quoted Yellow Pages (Canada) exec Richard Langlois as saying. "We put the AtScale Adaptive Cache technology through a test on 38 billion rows of data. The results were beyond expectations."

AtScale supports all the leading distributors of enterprise Hadoop-based offerings -- Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies -- and is available through a recent partnership with AltiScale. The AtScale platform reportedly can work natively with various SQL-on-Hadoop engines such as Impala, SparkSQL and Hive-Tez.

"The industry is going through a massive transformation and enterprises need a solution that allows business users to access any data from anywhere," said founder and CEO Dave Mariani. "Enabling this level of accessibility requires sophistication and a solid and secure platform. With this release, AtScale becomes the BI on Hadoop vendor with the most enterprise-ready capabilities."