philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The tool is one of a growing number of that seek to mimic the way web giants like Google and Facebook rapidly analyze enormous amounts of online information stored across hundreds or even thousands of machines. This includes everything from a projectcalled Drill, from a company called MapR, to a sweeping open source platformcalled Spark. ...

The idea behind Quest is to make it simple for analysts to query data from anywhere in a company with a single tool, regardless of where that data is stored, without the need to learn new programming languages. Using Quest, analysts can query traditional sources such as Oracle’s flagship database, “big data” storage systems like Hadoop, log files, Word documents, images and media files, and more. But it isn’t just a search engine.

Just like Dremel, Quest lets you query data using a SQL-like language. “Our view is that if you can show people the traditional metaphors that they’re used to, such as tables and SQL queries, that’s the easiest way for them to get started,” he says. “We’re trying to support all the traditional metaphors without teaching people new things.”