Open Source columnar storage engine for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem in use at Xiaomi, JD Mall, and RMS, among others.

Forest Hill, MD —20 September 2016— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache® Kudu™ v1.0, the Open Source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop® ecosystem.
Apache Kudu is designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines.Optimized for lightning-fast scans, Kudu is particularly well suited to hosting time-series data and various types of operational data. In addition to its impressive scan speed, Kudu supports many operations available in traditional databases, including real-time insert, update, and delete operations. Kudu enables a "bring your own SQL" philosophy, and supports being accessed by multiple different query engines including such other Apache projects as Drill™, Spark™, and Impala (incubating).
"The Apache Kudu 1.0 release represents a major milestone for the project," said Todd Lipcon, Vice President of Apache Kudu. "One year after the first public beta, the community is confident that Kudu is ready for production for critical business use cases."
Apache Kudu 1.0 is the project's first milestone release since first joining The Apache Software Foundation a year ago, and includes a number of important features that include:
  • Support for redundant and highly available Kudu Master nodes;
  • Support for manual management of range partitioning, critical for time series workloads;
  • Rewritten integration with Apache Spark, including Spark SQL and Data Frame APIs;
  • An officially supported client library for Python; and
  • Substantial performance improvements both for random access and analytic workloads.
These features, along with hundreds of other improvements, bug fixes, and optimizations, represent the work of more than 40 contributors in the Apache community.
Apache Kudu is in use at numerous organizations around the world, spanning industries such as retail, online service delivery, risk management, and digital advertising. Early users of Kudu include Xiaomi (the world's fourth largest smart-phone maker), JD Mall (China's largest B2C online retailer), and RMS (the market leader in catastrophe risk modelling).
After three years of prototyping and development, Kudu was first unveiled to the world at Strata/Hadoop World NYC in September, 2015. Several months later, Kudu was submitted to the Apache Incubator, where the project began to attract a community of active developers and users. In July, 2016, Kudu graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project.

"Kudu 1.0 is the most performant, full-featured, and stable release of Kudu yet. Every day we see new users joining the community, deploying Kudu alongside other Apache projects such as Impala and Spark to solve valuable real-time use cases," added Lipcon. "Kudu expands the Apache Hadoop ecosystem's capabilities, enabling real-time data ingestion and updates while also serving high performance analytics with a substantially simplified architecture."

"The availability of Kudu 1.0 is an exciting milestone and my data science team is eager to evaluate it. We do a lot of work with time series workflows in science data systems and the speed-ups there should really help in our deployment of Kudu," said Chris Mattmann, Chief Architect in the Instrument and Science Data Systems Section at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and member of the Apache Kudu Project Management Committee.

The Apache Kudu project welcomes contributions and community participation through mailing lists, a Slack channel, face-to-face MeetUps, and other events. Catch Apache Kudu in action at Strata/Hadoop World, 26-29 September in New York City, where engineers from Cloudera, Comcast Xfinity, and GE Digital will present sessions related to Kudu.
Availability and Oversight
Apache Kudu software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Kudu, visit http://kudu.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheKudu
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 550 individual Members and 5,300 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSIGMA, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, OPDi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Kudu", "Apache Kudu", "Drill", "Apache Drill", "Spark", "Apache Spark", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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