I’m happy to announce that we just released the MapR Hive ODBC Driver. It is available to all MapR M3 and M5 users.
The MapR Hive ODBC Driver is a standard ODBC 3.52 driver, allowing our users to leverage hundreds of commercial and open source SQL-based tools, such as query builders and BI applications. For example, we’ve tested our Hive ODBC Connector with Excel, Tableau, MicroStrategy and a variety of 100% open source SQL tools, such as Kaimon (http://www.kaimon.cl).
As you may know, we deliver the most open Hadoop distribution, supporting the broadest ecosystem of applications. As a Hadoop distribution, we obviously support the Hadoop APIs, but we also support a standard NFS interface, which allows any file-based application to read and write data. With our new Hive ODBC Connector, we allow SQL-based applications to run SQL queries (via Hive).
Other Hadoop vendors have struggled to support connectivity with third-party SQL-based applications, resulting in specialized, proprietary connectors. For example, one Hadoop vendor had to build special-purpose connectors for Tableau and MicroStrategy (based on partial ODBC 2.x support), and even a rudimentary Web-based query builder. Another Hadoop vendor announced a specialized connector for Excel. We decided to take the more open approach of providing a single ODBC driver that complies with the latest ODBC 3.52 standard so that our users can utilize practically any SQL-based query builder or BI application with no special-purpose connectors.
Here’s a screenshot showing Kaimon, an open source SQL query builder, analyzing some Apache httpd logs via the MapR Hive ODBC Connector:
Here’s a similar screenshot with Microsoft Excel:
To get started, check out the Hive ODBC Connector page in our documentation: http://www.mapr.com/doc/display/MapR/Hive+ODBC+Connector