HAWQ, developed at Pivotal, is a massively parallel processing SQL engine sitting on top of HDFS. As a hybrid of MPP database and Hadoop, it inherits the merits from both parties. It adopts a layered architecture and relies on the distributed file system for data replication and fault tolerance. In addition, it is standard SQL compliant, and unlike other SQL engines on Hadoop, it is fully transactional. This paper presents the novel design of HAWQ, including query processing, the scalable software interconnect based on UDP protocol, transaction management, fault tolerance, read optimized storage, the extensible framework for supporting various popular Hadoop based data stores and formats, and various optimization choices we considered to enhance the query performance. The extensive performance study shows that HAWQ is about 40x faster than Stinger, which is reported 35x-45x faster than the original Hive.

MADlib is a free, open-source library of in-database analytic methods. It provides an evolving suite of SQL-based algorithms for machine learning, data mining and statistics that run at scale within a database engine, with no need for data import/export to other tools. The goal is for MADlib to eventually serve a role for scalable database systems that is similar to the CRAN library for R: a community repository of statistical methods, this time written with scale and parallelism in mind. In this paper we introduce the MADlib project, including the background that led to its beginnings, and the motivation for its open-source nature. We provide an overview of the library's architecture and design patterns, and provide a description of various statistical methods in that context. We include performance and speedup results of a core design pattern from one of those methods over the Greenplum parallel DBMS on a modest-sized test cluster. We then report on two initial efforts at incorporating academic research into MADlib, which is one of the project's goals. MADlib is freely available at http://madlib.net, and the project is open for contributions of both new methods, and ports to additional database platforms.

As massive data acquisition and storage becomes increasingly affordable, a wide variety of enterprises are employing statisticians to engage in sophisticated data analysis. In this paper we highlight the emerging practice of Magnetic, Agile, Deep (MAD) data analysis as a radical departure from traditional Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence. We present our design philosophy, techniques and experience providing MAD analytics for one of the world's largest advertising networks at Fox Audience Network, using the Greenplum parallel database system. We describe database design methodologies that support the agile working style of analysts in these settings. We present dataparallel algorithms for sophisticated statistical techniques, with a focus on density methods. Finally, we reflect on database system features that enable agile design and flexible algorithm development using both SQL and MapReduce interfaces over a variety of storage mechanisms.