The last few weeks have seen a rush of investment in companies that offer Hadoop-powered Big Data platforms – the most recent being Intel’s investment in Cloudera, but Hortonworks has also snorted up $100m.
Gartner correctly explains that Hadoop isn’t just one project, but an ecosystem comprising an increasing number of open source projects (and some closed source distributions and add-ons). Once you’ve got your Big Data in a HDFS-shaped pile, there are many ways to make sense of it – and one of those is a search engine, so there’s been a lot of work recently trying to add Lucene-powered search engines such as Apache Solr and Elasticsearch into the mix. There’s also been some interesting partnerships.
I’m thus wondering whether this could signal a significant boost to the development of these search projects: there are already Lucene/Solr committers working at Hadoop-flavoured companies who have been working on distributed search and other improvements to scalability. Let’s hope some of the investment cash goes to search!
