Apache Drill is an open-sourcesoftware framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. Drill is the open source version of Google's Dremel system which is available as an infrastructure service called Google BigQuery. One explicitly stated is that Drill is able to scale to 10,000 servers or more and to be able to process petabytes of data and trillions of records in seconds. Drill is an Apache top-level project. Drill supports a variety of NoSQL databases and file systems, including Alluxio, HBase, MongoDB, MapR-DB, HDFS, MapR-FS, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Swift, NAS and local files. A single query can join data from multiple datastores. For example, you can join a user profile collection in MongoDB with a directory of event logs in Hadoop. Drill's datastore-aware optimizer automatically restructures a query plan to leverage the datastore's internal processing capabilities. In addition, Drill supports data locality, if Drill and the datastore are on the same nodes. Apache Drill 1.9 added dynamic user defined functions. Apache Drill 1.11 added cryptographic-related functions and PCAP file format support.
Features
Schema-free JSON document model similar to MongoDB and Elasticsearch, without requiring a formal schema to be declared
Pluggable architecture enables connectivity to multiple datastores
Back-end Support
Drill is primarily focused on non-relational datastores, including Apache Hadooptext files, NoSQL, and cloud storage. A notable feature also includes in situ querying of local JSON and Apache Parquet files. Some additional datastores that it supports include:
All Hadoop distributions, including Apache Hadoop, MapR, CDH and Amazon EMR
A new datastore can be added by developing a storage plugin. Drill's "schema-free" JSON data model enables it to query non-relational datastores in-situ.
Front-end Support
Drill itself can be queried via JDBC, ODBC, or REST through a variety of methods and languages including Python and Java. The default install includes a web interface allowing end-users to execute ANSI SQL directly and export data tables as CSV files without any programming. The dashboard library, Apache Superset, is particularly well suited for visualization of data queried with Drill.
Papers
Some papers influenced the birth and design. Here is a partial list:
2005 , the authors highlight the need for storage systems to accept all data formats and to provide APIs for data access that evolve based on the storage system’s understanding of the data.
