Since moving into my new full-time role focused on big data analytics, I’ve had the opportunity to work extensively with Aster Data, which is a big data analytics platform that Teradata purchased recently.

What is unique about the Aster platform is that they’ve fully incorporated analytics into the database platform through SQL and the MPP distributed architecture. Certainly, other platforms like SQL Server & Netezza offer MPP architecture and analytics. But there are 2 unique characteristics about Aster that I find very impressive and that we are taking advantage of:

1. Aster allows for your own SQL UDF extensions written in Java using MapReduce. They call this platform SQL-MR. It’s very helpful to our data scientists to be able to have developers code MR functions that can then be called from SQL commands.
2. We just installed Aster 5.0 which includes SQL-H, which will allow us to enable queries across data stored in Aster’s schemas together with data that we keep in Hadoop clusters, using Hive & HCatalog: http://www.asterdata.com/sqlh/.

If you want to try some of these out for yourself on Aster, they’ve made an Express version available that you can download as a VM image here: http://downloads.teradata.com/download/aster/aster-express.

Best, Mark