Toad World

By all measures the Yahoo HadoopSummit this year was a huge hit. It united more than 1,600 Hadoopers (I admit the term is annoying, but I’m going with it) from around the world (but I think most came right from Silicon Valley) to learn about all things big data and Hadoop.

This event was a springboard for many Hadoop related news with Yahoo’s announcement of HortonWorks drawing the most attention. There were no shortage of vendors showcasing their hadoop management tools either, most notably off the top of my head were of course Quest, Cloudera, MapR, DataStax, AsterData, Karmasphere, Pervasive and Hadapt.

While Toad for Cloud Databases is essentially a SQL IDE that’s used to write SQL queries against NoSQL databases and supports HBase, Hive, Cassandra, MongoDB, SimpleDB, Azure and others, but obviously the Hadoopers were most interested in what we were doing with HBase and Hive. There was also some interest in our tool that connects Oracle to Hadoop. We got tons of good questions, both simple to the very technical, and I’ll try to summarize a few:

Question  - Why is Quest at the HadoopSummit? Aren’t you guys that ones that have Toad for Oracle and what can you help me do with Hadoop?

Answer – Yes, Quest makes Toad, not the other way around. And just like the Toad for Oracle that you love, Toad for Cloud Databases gives you a SQL IDE that lets you write SQL against HBase, Hive and other NoSQL things. Basically we have hadoop management and NoSQL management tools.

Question – Can’t you already write SQL ad-hoc queries against Hadoop with Hive? Why Toad?

Answer – Hive uses its own query language called HiveQL or HQL which is “SQL like”…but its not SQL, it has limitations and you still have to learn it. Toad for Cloud lets you use ANSI SQL across Hive and HBase.

Question – Why is Toad for Cloud Databases free?

Answer – Just like our other Toad products, we have products that are easy to download and try. We want to support this community and make sure it succeeds with easy to use tools that help adopt these new technologies. Download it for free here on ToadWorld.com

We got lots of other questions, but those seem to be the most common ones, or at least the ones the “marketing guy” could answer. If you have more questions, then check out our NoSQLPedia.com page or forums within ToadWorld.

Here are a few photos from the event:

Guy showing off our Quest Data Connector for Oracle and Hadoop