Aster Data Systems Makes MapReduce Accessible to .NET Developers
Enterprise-class MapReduce designed for SQL and .NET developers
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Aster Data Systems today announced that any enterprise development team standardized on the Microsoft .NET development platform now can easily write “big data, rich computation” applications that employ MapReduce.
Aster nCluster and Aster nCluster Cloud Edition, a database that tightly integrates SQL with MapReduce, now lets .NET developers write MapReduce functions in C# and have them execute in the database to empower data-driven applications and business analysis. This extends the Aster nCluster In-Database MapReduce framework support for Java, Python, Perl, and C++, among other languages.
MapReduce is a programming model popularized by Google in 2004 to process large unstructured data sets distributed across thousands of nodes. In-Database MapReduce enables enterprises to harness the power of MapReduce while managing their data in Aster nCluster, a highly scalable relational database for data warehousing and analytics. Aster nCluster was the first database system to offer enterprise-class MapReduce capabilities such as integration with BI and ETL tools, SQL support, backup and recovery, transactional data consistency, and support for interactive and batch analytics.
Based on a survey of 445 North American and European enterprise software decision-makers responsible for software development, Forrester Research's report, The State of Enterprise Software: 2009 by R “Ray” Wang and Jean-Pierre Garbani found that enterprises that custom-develop software applications are likely to deploy them internally. Furthermore, 62 percent of enterprises develop on the Microsoft .NET platform. For custom-developed applications, 43 percent of enterprises use Microsoft C# for development or maintenance.
“That is a large percentage of developers who can now leverage Aster nCluster In-Database MapReduce for its scalability and rich analytical prowess on ‘big data’ without a painful learning process. This is a valuable advantage for enterprises to develop powerful, data-driven business applications,” said Tasso Argyros, CTO of Aster.
SQL-MapReduce (SQL/MR) functions within the Aster nCluster In-Database MapReduce framework are simple to write in C# and make available to business analysts and business intelligence (BI) tools via standard SQL. They enable SQL queries to manipulate the underlying data and provide input.
The SQL/MR functions can procedurally manipulate such input data and provide outputs that can be further consumed by SQL queries or be written into tables within the database, providing rich analytical functions which can be “developed once, used everywhere” by applications or business analysts. This creates an elegant separation of roles between developers and analysts who want to iterate analytical models through standard SQL, without burdening developers to rewrite functions each time something changes, speeding up the knowledge discovery process.
For more information on Aster In-Database MapReduce, including sample applications and SQL/MR code, visit www.asterdata.com/mapreduce.