Google's hosted BigQuery analytics service is being positioned to take advantage of the need for new big data technologies.
In fact, said Gartner analyst Rita Sallam, the Dremel-based hosted service could be a game changer for big data analytics.
The service allows enterprises to interactively query massive data sets without having to buy expensive underlying analytics technologies, Sallam said. Business can explore and experiment with different data types and different data volumes at a fraction of what it would cost to buy a enterprise data analytics platform, she said.
The real noteworthy aspect of BigQuery is not its underlying technology, but its potential to cut IT costs at large companies, she said.
"It offers a much more cost effective way to analyze large sets of data," compared to traditional enterprise data platforms "It really has a potential to change the cost equation and allow companies to experiment with their big data," Sallam said.
Major vendors of business intelligence products, including SAS Institute, SAP, Oracle, Teradata and Hewlett-Packard Co., have been rushing to deliver tools that deliver improved data analytics capabilities. Like Google, most of these vendors see Hadoop platform mainly as a massive data store for preparing and staging multi-structured data for analysis by other tools.
Just last week, SAP unveiled a new big data bundle designed to let large organizations integrate Hadoop environments with SAP's HANA in-memory database and associated technologies.
The bundled product uses the SAP HANA platform to read and load data from Hadoop environments and then do fast interactive analytics on the data using SAP's reporting and analytics tools.
SAS announced a similar capability for its High Performance Analytic Server a few weeks ago. HP, with technology gained in its acquisition of Vertica, and Teradata, with its Aster-Hadoop Adaptor, and IBM with its Netezza tool sets, offer or will soon offer similar capabilities.
The business has also attracted a handful of startups.
One, Metamarkets, has developed a cloud-based service designed to help companies analyze copious amounts of fresh streaming data in real-time. At the heart of the service is an internally developed distributed in-memory, columnar database technology called Druid, according to the company's CEO Michael Driscoll. He compares Druid to Dremel in concept.
