World's first schema-free SQL query engine brings self-service data exploration to Apache Hadoop™

Forest Hill, MD –02 December 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 200 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache™ Drill™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles. 

Apache Drill is the world's first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed. Drill users can run interactive ANSI SQL queries on complex or constantly evolving data including JSON, Parquet, and HBase without ever worrying about schema definitions. As a result, Drill not only enables rapid application development on Apache Hadoop™ but also allows enterprise BI analysts to access Hadoop in a self-service fashion. 

"Apache Drill's graduation is a testament to the maturity of the technology and a strong indicator of the active community that develops and supports it," said Jacques Nadeau, Vice President of Apache Drill. "Drill's vibrant community ensures that it will continue to evolve to meet the demands of self-service data exploration use cases." 

While providing faster time to value from data stored in Hadoop, Drill also reduces the burden on IT developers and administrators who prepare and maintain datasets for analysis. Analysts can explore data in real-time, pull in new datasets on the fly, and also use traditional BI tools to visualize the data easily – all by themselves. 

Inspired by Google's Dremel (an academic paper on interactive analysis of Web-scale datasets), and a vision to support modern big data applications, Drill entered the Apache Incubator in August 2012. The project currently has code contributions from individual committers representing MapR, Hortonworks, Pentaho, and Cisco, among others. 

"We see the Apache Top-Level Project status as a major milestone for Drill. With a growing user base and diverse community interest, we are excited that Drill will indeed be a game changer for Hadoop application developers and BI analysts alike," said Tomer Shiran, member of the Apache Drill Project Management Committee. 

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Drill 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 documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Drill, visit http://drill.apache.org and https://twitter.com/ApacheDrill

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than two hundred 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 500 individual Members and 4,500 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 Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter. 

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache Drill", "Drill", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "ApacheCon," and the Apache Drill logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 

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