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October 29, 2013

Simba Says It’s Winning the Hadoop Wars

As a journalist covering big data, I’m often asked who is winning the Hadoop wars.  While the answer might vary from month-to-month, there’s at least one vendor who appears to clearly be winning: ODBC Connectivity vendor Simba Technologies.

While Apache Hadoop distributions vary from vendor to vendor, there is at least one thing that most of the major distribution companies have settled on: standardization for ODBC connectivity using Simba Technologies. Using the Strata + Hadoop World 2013 conference as a backdrop, Simba announced this week that they are now the de-facto standard for major Hadoop vendors including Cloudera, Hortonworks, Intel, and MapR – all of which have selected the Simba Apache Hive ODBC driver with SQL Connector to link data to BI and analytic tools.

“Simba Technologies is honored to be partnering with these Hadoop distributions to provide powerful ODBC connections for their customers,” said George Chow, CTO with Simba Technologies in a statement. “This journey began over 20 years ago when we co-developed the ODBC standard with Microsoft and we are now establishing the new standard for Hadoop ODBC connectivity with these important partnerships.”

While Simba is making significant inroads into the Hadoop space, the company has also made notable penetration with other NoSQL databases, including MongoDB and Cassandra. Earlier this year, Simba partnered with Informatica to provide read and write access to both NoSQL vendor databases, giving them access to BI applications such as Excel, Alteryx, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects and others. The MongoDB connector was released late this past Summer, and the Cassandra connector is slated for release later this year.

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Simba Technologies first came on the scene in the early 90’s when it was developed in concert with Microsoft and included in the 3.1 version of Windows. It has since grown to be a widely-used data access technology for any number of systems, from standard relational to newer NoSQL technologies.

Through its connectors and SDKs Simba, enables developers to build data connectors that provide access between applications and databases.

Related items:

New Algorithms May Give Keys to Predicting the Future 

Hadoop Version 2: One Step Closer to the Big Data Goal

The Big Data Market By the Numbers

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