Cloudera Releases Navigator Optimizer Suite In Beta

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Cloudera is making a beta release of its Navigator Optimizer suite for data management available to customers Thursday, alongside its normal point release of its Cloudera Enterprise big data platform.

The beta release is limited to Cloudera's existing customers.

Navigator Optimizer is crafted to measure incoming queries, gauge their impact on the IT system, and help decide which platform can best handle the query without bogging down the entire system.

"Inefficiently allocated data workloads are all too common across enterprises -- causing costly delays, errors, and complexity. Customers need visibility into their workloads and guidance to ensure the best results with Hadoop," Charles Zedlewski, vice president of products at Cloudera wrote in a November 19 statement.

Optimizer Navigator, now in beta, was an outgrowth of an acquisition made back in February, when Cloudera bought a small business intelligence software firm named Xplain.io. The firm's application, called Big Data Integration Service (BDIS), allows users to figure out which workloads are best suited for Hadoop.

BDIS relied on the queries themselves to figure out the business logic needed to process each query, map out actual data usage, and craft a data model without the need to hand-code.

Navigator Optimizer will be used to avoid big data processing bottlenecks, long wait times, and breakdowns in extract-transform-loading functions (ETL), and to organize access to the enterprise data warehouse. Workloads are analyzed to determine which ones are critical, what data is accessed, and how it is used. It then picks the best strategy to use through Hadoop. A dashboard displays that optimal strategy, flagging problems with the complexity of the query or duplicated information, and noting which applications are available to best handle the project.

Navigator Optimizer's release is typical of an ongoing trend in big data, where companies are crafting administrative utilities to handle Hadoop no differently than a conventional database.

Alongside Navigator Optimizer is the release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.5.

Analytics and security are the two broad classes of improvement in this point release. Cloudera is including analytics on complex data and nested data support for Impala, an open-source massively parallel processing database for Apache Hadoop.

On the security front, Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 includes secure data discovery, column-level security for Hive and Impala, and centralized credential management. Automated data stewardship also manages to link policy workflows with data management lifecycles.

SparkSQL support improves application development for data scientists as well as developers. SparkMLib support also brings machine learning to Hadoop. Spark and Hadoop are linked together under the One Platform Initiative, a goal announced by Cloudera this past September.

[Read how your company can avoid big data failures.]

Cloudera has maintained a high tempo of point releases and product releases throughout 2015, with the many pieces coming together to create an administrative system that manages Hadoop in the enterprise.

Along those lines, Cloudera last September released RecordService, which allows for single security management across multiple Hadoop service maps, and Kudu, which combines fast analytics with data updates.

Cloudera is not alone in this development frenzy, as Hortonworks, MapR, and even IBM are all crafting utilities and toolsets to manage data flows, data access, and Hadoop applications.

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