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As the author of the above post, I thought I'd respond to the comments below. Firstly, I'm glad to see that people noticed... :-) Firstly, to paraphrase Monty Python, "Drill's not dead yet." There are some efforts to get corporate sponsorship, but it will take time. HPE's withdrawal was expected, but disappointing none the less. With that said, we are still gearing up to release Drill 1.18 which will have a considerable amount of enhancements, including new formats (SPSS, HDF5, possibly SAS) as well as new storage plugins to enable Drill to connect to Druid as well as REST APIs. Personally, I've always felt that Drill was marketed to the wrong audience. As everyone notes, there are many competitors in the big data analytics space: Spark, ES, Splunk, Presto, Impala to name a few. Where I see Drill as filling a rather unique niche in the market is the small-to medium size data analytics with complex data. For instance, if you have a CSV file, you use Excel. If you have 100 CSVs you have to code. Or what if you have an Excel spreadsheet and you want to pull data from your corporate reference API, which happens to return JSON and uses OAUTH authentication? Drill is the kind of tool that can bridge this gap and allow analysts to rapidly get value out of these situations. As an example, here's a demo of me building a COVID dashboard from a REST API and spreadsheet in about 15 min with zero data prep: https://youtu.be/oEOhFWm3D9A Another example: incident response. Let's say you have a PCAP file, use Wireshark. What if you have 10GB of PCAP files? Most likely you'll have to code up some solution. With Drill however, you can query that w/o coding, which means that you can get the value out of this data faster. I know there are people using Drill. I know when I demo Drill to analysts, they love it. (Ok.. I'm biased here but I would say that's an accurate representation of the response to my presentations) What Drill lost was an active developer community. I hope over the next few months, that Drill's users will step up a bit and contribute to code reviews and/or actual code contributions. I've been thinking about creating a security focused fork of Drill as well so we'll see what happens. If you have ideas/comments/questions, you can email me at cgivre@apache.org. |