Teradata grabs Hortonworks by trunk

Teradata doesn't want to be an elephant, it wants to ride them.

The data warehousing pioneer has been loath to create its own distribution of the Hadoop data muncher – most likely because of the shortage of deep Hadoop skills out there – and has been partnering to lash the open source MapReduce program and file system to its Aster Data SQL-MapReduce hybrid and its Teradata data warehouse appliances.

A year and a half ago, Teradata partnered with Cloudera, the upstart company founded by several of the key people at Yahoo!, where Hadoop was invented, to provide a pipe linking Hadoop clusters to Teradata warehouses.

Since that time, a number of other distributions of the Hadoop stack have been launched to compete with Cloudera's CDH3, including MapR Technologies' M3 open source and M5 open-core, which is resold by EMC's Greenplum data warehousing division as MR Enterprise Edition, and the Hortonworks Data Platform. Hortonworks is a later spinout of techies from Yahoo! who worked on more recent projects at the search engine and media company. Neither Cloudera nor MapR are committed to open sourcing all their goodies, but Hortonworks is. It is not clear how important this is to Teradata or its customers. Read more...