Hortonworks today announced the submission of two new incubation projects to the Apache Software Foundation and the launch of the Stinger Initiative, three efforts aimed at enhancing the security and performance of Hadoop applications.

“Our approach to innovation has been consistent from when our team began their work on the Hadoop project at Yahoo! more than seven years ago,” said Greg Pavlik, vice president of engineering for Hortonworks. “Simply put, we believe that the fastest way to innovate is to do our work within the open source community, introduce enterprise feature requirements into the public domain, and collaborate with others to progress existing open source projects or incubate new projects to meet those needs. By staying true to our 100-percent open source philosophy and applying enterprise software rigor to the test and release process, we can continue to accelerate the adoption of Hadoop within mainstream enterprises.”

The proposed incubation projects and the Stinger Initiative follow on the success of similar innovative projects initiated within the community by Hortonworks engineers, including Apache Ambari, Apache HCatalog and Apache Hadoop YARN, which are now foundational elements of Apache Hadoop for the enterprise.

The new efforts focus on enterprise requirements that are essential for broad adoption across the Hadoop ecosystem:

• The Stinger Initiative to Optimize Apache Hive for Interactive Queries: Stinger represents a concerted effort by Hortonworks and the broader Apache community to improve Hive performance and better serve business intelligence use cases such as interactive data exploration, visualization and parameterized reporting. It is complementary to best-of-breed data warehouse and analytic platforms. As approximately 50 percent of Hadoop users depend on Hive for SQL-based operational data processing, enhancing Hive’s SQL capabilities and optimizing its query performance in support of user-focused SQL interactions is critical to ensuring Hive remains the de-facto standard for SQL queries with Hadoop. 
• Tez Next-generation Runtime Proposed as Apache Incubator Project: The Tez proposal aims to enhance the performance of Hadoop components that currently run on MapReduce, such as Apache Hive, by providing an alternative, next-generation runtime built on Hadoop YARN that significantly improves latency and throughput of Hadoop applications.
• Hadoop Gateway Proposed as Apache Incubator Project: The Hadoop Gateway proposal addresses the need for a single point of authentication and secure access for Apache Hadoop services in a cluster, which will simplify Hadoop security for users who access data and execute jobs and operators who control and manage the cluster. 

Hortonworks has proposed Tez and Hadoop Gateway as incubator projects to the Apache Software Foundation and looks forward to engaging with the community on these proposals.