Apache Drill is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. Built chiefly by contributions from developers from MapR, Drill is inspired by Google’s Dremel system. Drill is an Apache top-level project. Drill supports a variety of NoSQL databases and file systems, including HBase, MongoDB, MapR-DB, HDFS, MapR-FS, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Swift, NAS and local files. A single query can join data from multiple datastores. For example, you can join a user profile collection in MongoDB with a directory of event logs in Hadoop. Drill’s datastore-aware optimizer automatically restructures a query plan to leverage the datastore’s internal processing capabilities. In addition, Drill supports data locality, so it’s a good idea to co-locate Drill and the datastore on the same nodes.
