Learning Apache Drill: Query and Analyze Structured Data

Apache Drill enables interactive analysis of massively large datasets, allowing you to execute SQL queries against data in many different data sources—including Hadoop and MongoDB clusters, HBase, or even your local file system—and get results quickly. With this practical guide, analysts and data scientists focused on business or research applications will learn how to incorporate Drill capabilities into complex programs, including how to use Drill queries to replace some MapReduce operations in a large-scale program.

Drill committers Charles Givre and Paul Rogers provide an introduction to Drill and its ability to handle large files containing data in flexible formats with nested data structures and tables. You’ll discover how this capability fills a gap in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Additional topics show you how to:

• Prepare and organize data to maximize Drill performance
• Set expectations for Drill performance on different data types and volumes
• Reconcile Drill’s schema-free features with schema-full JDBC and ODBC clients