Cloudera announced on Monday that it has added Cloudera SQL Stream Builder to its portfolio. The tool is based on the technology it gained after acquiring Eventador. With it, users can employ SQL to query streams of data in real-time.
The Eventador tool is now part of the Cloudera DataFlow (CDF) streaming platform that provides a common framework for streaming data using open-source engines like Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, and Spark Structured Streaming.
Before now, the only way to query that type of data was to use programming tools based on Scala or Java.
The tool we needed
Data analysts will now be able to query CFD data without having to know how to write code, according to Dinesh Chandrasekhar, the head of product marketing for the company.
SQL Stream Builder also enables analysts to create views of query results that can be exposed to other apps using the REST application programming interfaces (APIs). To enforce security policies and governance across CDF, the tool was also integrated with the Shared Data Experience (SDX) framework.
Even with the rise of a variety of programming languages used to analyze data, the dominant way in enterprises remains SQL.
The tool we deserve
The problem with SQL being the choice is that querying streaming data in real-time, the organizations want to extend SQL to do things like identifying anomalies in processes that can be indicative of fraud, for example.
The need for a tool like this is being driven by the digital transformation that requires data to be processed and analyzed in real-time on platforms like Spark and Kafka. At some point, the analyst will need to launch an ad hoc inquiry against data to resolve a problem before the data goes to storage in a relational database.
This tool will come in handy for things like that.