Wakefield, MA —23 August 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache^® HAWQ^® as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache HAWQ is an advanced enterprise SQL-on-Hadoop query engine and analytic database. It combines the key technological advantages of MPP database with the scalability and convenience of Apache Hadoop. HAWQ reads data from and writes data to HDFS natively, delivers industry-leading performance and linear scalability, and provides users with a complete, standards compliant SQL interface.

"We are very excited to see Apache HAWQ graduate as a Top-Level Project and we would like to thank our Incubation mentors for all their help," said Dr. Lei Chang, Vice President of Apache HAWQ. "This is a huge milestone that reflects the collective contributions from the growing global community to deliver a world-class SQL engine for analytics."

HAWQ operates natively in Apache Hadoop to provide users the tools to confidently and successfully interact with petabyte-range data sets. Features include:

• Exceptional performance: parallel processing architecture delivers high performance throughput and low latency —potentially near real time— query responses that can scale to petabyte-sized datasets;
• Robust ANSI SQL compliance: leverage familiar skills. Achieve higher levels of compatibility for SQL-based applications and BI/data visualization tools. Execute complex queries and joins, including roll-ups and nested queries; and 
• Apache Hadoop ecosystem integration: integrate and manage with Apache YARN. Provision with Apache Ambari. Interface with Apache HCatalog. Supports Apache Parquet, Apache HBase, and others. Easily scales nodes up or down to meet performance or capacity requirements.

Apache HAWQ is in use at Alibaba, Haier, VMware, ZTESoft, and hundreds of users around the world.

"We admire Apache HAWQ's flexible framework and ability to scale up in a Cloud ecosystem. HAWQ helps those seeking a heterogeneous computing system to handle ad-hoc queries and heavy batch workloads," said Kuien Liu, Computing Platform Architect at Alibaba. "Alibaba encourages more and more engineers to continue to embrace Open Source, and Apache HAWQ stands out as a star project. We are proud to have been collaborating with this community since 2015."

"Haier Group has deployed clusters of more than 30 nodes in the production environment from the very beginning of HAWQ," said Xiaoliang Wu, Big Data Architect at Haier. "We use HAWQ as an ad-hoc query and batch computation engine in areas such as social network services and IOT. Because of its superior scalability and stability, HAWQ greatly improves development efficiency and reduces operation and maintenance costs. We believe that Apache HAWQ is a very competitive product in the SQL-On-Hadoop field."

"We have been using Apache HAWQ at VMware for 4 years now," said Dominie Jacob, Lead Big Data Engineer at VMware Inc. "It is easy to manage and scale using Apache Ambari, and easy to provision and attach more nodes based on demand. Being virtualized, it is easy to provision and attach more nodes based on demand. In our BI Big Data world, HAWQ is the primary database for accessing the Hadoop datasets, building models, and executing predictive model workflows. HAWQ is working seamlessly with billions of records, thousands of Tables/Functions/Tableau-Reports, and hundreds of users. The demand for HAWQ is increasing. As VMware always encourages us to pick up and contribute back to Open Source technologies, we would love to collaborate with this community and see more enhancements. In our BI space, HAWQ is one of the top priorities."

"Apache HAWQ is an attractive technology for Big Data applications," said Zixu Zhao, Architect at ZTESoft. "HAWQ serves as the foundation of our Big Data platform and it has been used in a lot of applications, such as interactive analytics and BI on telecom data. We congratulate HAWQ on becoming an Apache Top-Level Project."

"Becoming an Apache Top-Level Project is an important milestone," added Chang. "There is much work ahead of us, and we look forward to growing the HAWQ community and codebase."

Catch Apache HAWQ in action at ApacheCon North America 24-27 September 2018 http://apachecon.com/acna18/ .

Apache HAWQ software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache HAWQ, visit http://hawq.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheHAWQ .

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 730 individual Members and 6,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "HAWQ", "Apache HAWQ", "Ambari", "Apache Ambari", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "HBase", "Apache HBase", "HCatalog", "Apache HCatalog", "Parquet", "Apache Parquet", "YARN", "Apache YARN", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #