Drilling Through Data Silos with Apache Drill

Enterprise data collections are typically stored in silos belonging to different business divisions. Sometimes these silos belong to different projects within the same division. These silos may be further segmented by services/products and functions. Silos (which stifle data-sharing and innovation) are often identified as a primary impediment (both practically and culturally) to business progress and thus they may be the cause of numerous difficulties. For example, streamlining important business processes are rendered more challenging, ranging from compliance to data discovery. But, breaking down the silos may not be so easy to accomplish. In fact, it is often infeasible due to ownership issues, governance practices, and regulatory concerns.

Big Data silos create additional complications including data duplication (and associated increased costs), complicated data replication solutions, high data latency, and data quality concerns, not to mention being an enabler of the real problematic situation where your data repositories could hold different versions of the truth. The silos also put a limit on business intelligence (discovery and actionable insights). As big data best practices rise above the hype and noise, we now know that actionable value is more easily extracted when multiple data sets can be integrated and viewed holistically.

Data analysts naturally want to break down silos to combine data from multiple data sources. Unfortunately, this can create its own bottleneck: a complex integration labyrinth—which is costly to maintain, rarely performs well, and can’t be guaranteed to provide consistent results.

In response, many companies have deployed Apache Hadoop to address the problem of segregated data. Hadoop enables multiple types of data to be directly processed in place, and it fully supports data integration from multiple sources across different data storage technologies.

Organizations that use Hadoop are finding additional benefits with Apache Drill, which is the open source version of Google’s Dremel system…

(continue reading here https://www.mapr.com/blog/drive-innovation-breaking-down-data-silos-apache-drill)

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne

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