SQL on Hadoop benchmarks get serious

Unless a "neutral" third party publishes them, we tend to view benchmarks as self-serving exercises that vendors typically stack in their own favor. But recent benchmarks issued by Cloudera and Hortonworks for their SQL on Hadoop engines point to something serious going on. In an era of Spark hype, SQL remains table stakes for Hadoop platforms. Yes, you can perform machine learning, model customer ecosystems as social graphs, run streaming, and conduct sentiment analysis, but for most organizations, the first question they often ask is how fast is the interactive SQL. Using Hadoop only for SQL query might seem like a waste, given its appeal to R or Python developers.