HPE Data Fabric (formerly MapR, acquired by HPE in 2019) is a software-defined datastore and file system that simplifies data management and analytics by unifying data across core, edge, and multicloud sources into a single platform.
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Db2 Big SQL
Score 9.0 out of 10
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IBM offers Db2 Big SQL, an enterprise grade hybrid ANSI-compliant SQL on Hadoop engine, delivering massively parallel processing (MPP) and advanced data query. Big SQL offers a single database connection or query for disparate sources such as HDFS, RDMS, NoSQL databases, object stores and WebHDFS.
My recommendation obviously would depend on the application. But I think given the right requirements, IBM DB2 Big SQL is definitely a contender for a database platform. Especially when disparate data and multiple data stores are involved. I like the fact I can use the product to federate my data and make it look like it's all in one place. The engine is high performance and if you desire to use Hadoop, this could be your platform.
MapR had very fast I/O throughput. The write speed was several times faster than what we could achieve with the other Hadoop vendors (Cloudera and Hortonworks). This is because MapR does not use HDFS, which is essentially a "meta filesystem". HDFS is built on top of the filesystem provided by the OS. MapR has their filesystem called MapR-FS, which is a true filesystem and accesses the raw disk drives.
The MapR filesystem is very easy to integrate with other Linux filesystems. When working with HDFS from Apache Hadoop, you usually have to use either the HDFS API or various Hadoop/HDFS command line utilities to interact with HDFS. You cannot use command line utilities native to the host operation system, which is usually Linux. At least, it is not easily done without setting up NFS, gateways, etc. With MapR-FS, you can mount the filesystem within Linux and use the standard Unix commands to manipulate files.
The HBase distribution provided by MapR is very similar to the Apache HBase distribution. Cloudera and Hortonworks add GUIs and other various tools on top of their HBase distributions. The MapR HBase distribution is very similar to the Apache distribution, which is nice if you are more accustomed to using Apache HBase.
IBM DB2 is a solid service but hasn't seen much innovation over the past decade. It gets the job done and supports our IT operations across digital so it is fair.
IBM did a good job of supporting us during our evaluation and proof of concept. They were able to provide all necessary guidance, answer questions, help us architect it, etc. We were pleased with the support provided by the vendor. I will caveat and say this support was all before the sale, however, we have a ton of IBM products and they provide the same high level of support for all of them. I didn't see this being any different. I give IBM support two thumbs up!
MS SQL Server was ruled out given we didn't feel we could collapse environments. We thought of MS-SQL as more of a one for one replacement for Sybase ASE, i.e., server for server. SAP HANA was evaluated and given a big thumbs up but was rejected because the SQL would have to be rewritten at the time (now they have an accelerator so you don't have to). Also, there was a very low adoption rate within the enterprise. IBM DB2 Big SQL was not selected even though technically it achieved high scores, because we could not find readily available talent and low adoption rate within the enterprise (basically no adoption at the time). We ended up selecting Exadata because of the high adoption rate within the enterprise even though technically HANA and Big SQL were superior in our evaluations.
Increased employee efficiency for sure. Our clients have various levels of expertise in their deployment and user teams, and we never receive complaints about MapR.
MapR is used by one of our financial services clients who uses it for fraud detection and user pattern analysis. They are able to turn around data much faster than they previously had with in-house applications
