Metanautix recently announced the newest version of its product, Quest. Quest allows enterprises to build software defined data marts that can run in virtualized servers. Designed from the ground up with security and auditability in mind, Quest can deal with Big Data workloads and encapsulate it into different logical views, ready for consumption by different departments in enterprise.
Metanautix, founded by seasoned key employees in Google Dremel and Facebook Infrastructure seeks to integrate three in principle disconnected functions of the business intelligence and data warehousing departments. First of all Quest, like Google’s Dremel and Apache Drill is a distributed query engine that heavily uses networking to get to faster execution times.
Then, it’s a data preparation and movement engine. Using an ETL User Interface complementary to command line tools, both engineers, marketers and anyone else in an organization can design and implement ETL processes to bring data to the format needed for presentation. The ETL can be used for a wide range of tasks from querying for frames out of video to querying SQL Lego cars.
Finally, using extensive caching it can perform as an analytics processing platform. Built for the enterprise, it supports scalable deployments of multiple nodes in a cluster and fits easily with existing system architecture as it doesn’t require data to be moved from existing storage to new systems.
In bringing these functions together, Quest seeks to simplify the exploratory end to end process in big data analysis. At the SQL side, it is based on analytical declarative SQL supporting among others UDF that can be written in Java or Jython and table functions.
Quest has connectors for many major systems, ranging from high level Java based connectors for Cassandra to low level C++ connectors for MongoDB and Couchbase and also log files, Teradata, SalesForce, HDFS, S3, Quantcast and several others.
Existing customers include among others HP and Shutterfly and several use cases and examples are available in the online demo.