This whitepaper describes the advantages of merging the openness and productivity of SQL with the scalability of MapReduce to create a discovery platform that supports today’s complex and data-intensive analytical workload generated by data scientists. It focuses on the SQLMapReduce® implementation offered by Teradata through the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform which includes the Aster Database and Aster Discovery Portfolio.

The whitepaper also discusses some of the alternative technologies available for developing a discovery platform, such as Hadoop, MapReduce, NoSQL, schema-on-read, and SQL-fication.

Rick F. van der Lans is an independent analyst, consultant, author, and lecturer specializing in data warehousing, business intelligence, database technology, and data virtualization. He works for R20/Consultancy (www.r20.nl), a consultancy company he founded in 1987. Rick is chairman of the annual European Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Conference (organized in London). He writes for the eminent B-eye-Network.com13 and other websites. He introduced the business intelligence architecture called the Data Delivery Platform in 2009 in a number of articles14 all published at BeyeNetwork.com.

Rick is the author of many acclaimed books on SQL and database servers including “Introduction to SQL” which has been on the market for 20 years.