Cloudera has announced the general availability of Impala, its open source, interactive SQL query engine for analyzing data stored in Hadoop clusters in real time.

Impala has been available in public beta since October 2012, and a number of companies are already using it. Impala lets you query data stored in HDFS and HBase directly. The framework supports all standard file and data formats available, so you can choose the format that best your needs. The support extends to recent releases such as analytics-focused columnar formats like Parquet.

Impala lets you work from a single dataset, eliminating the need to migrate datasets into specialized systems or proprietary formats just because you want to work on it. The Impala framework is optimized for use with CDH, Cloudera’s open source distribution of Hadoop and related applications.

The final version has some new features compared to the beta, including ALTER TABLE and REFRESH for individual tables. It also supports dynamic resource management. Query hints have also been added to the SQL, so you can check for potential alternatives when a query is running slowly or tying up resources due to missing statistics.

While the main version is free for use, there’s an optional subscription module called Cloudera Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ) that adds technical support and management automation to Impala for Cloudera Enterprise customers.

Cloudera Enterprise with RTQ is based on Impala and offers a single, massively scalable system that can be used to provide petascale processing in real time. A number of companies have certified their analysis products for integration with the platform, including Alteryx, Capgemini, IBM Cognos, Karmasphere, MicroStrategy, Pentaho, QlikView, Splunk and Tableau.

A slide presentation An Introduction to Impala is available to view in return for contact details.