Although the yellow elephant continues to trample all over the world of Information Management, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say where more traditional technologies end and Hadoop begins.

Actian's (@ActianCorp) presentation at the #BBBT on 24 June emphasized again that the boundaries of the Hadoop world are becoming very ill-defined indeed, as more traditional engines are adapted to run on or in the Hadoop cluster.

The Actian Analytics Platform - Hadoop SQL Edition embeds their existing X100 / Vectorwise SQL engine directly in the nodes of the Hadoop environment. The approach offers the full range of SQL support previously available in Vectorwise on Hadoop. Architecturally as interesting, is the creation and use of column-based, binary, compressed vector files by the X100 engine for improved performance and the subsequent replication of these files by the Hadoop system. These latter files support co-location of data for joins for a further performance boost.

This is, of course, the type of integration one would expect from seasoned database developers when they migrate to a new platform. Pivotal's HAWQ has Greenplum technology embedded. It would be surprising if IBM's on-Hadoop Big SQL offering is not based on DB2 knowledge at the very least.

The real point is that the mix and match of functionality and data seen here emphasizes the conundrum I posed at the top of the blog. Where does Hadoop end? And where does "NoHadoop" (well, if we can have NoSQL...) begin? What does this all mean for the evolution of Information Management technology over the coming few years?

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