The ability to write an SQL statement against your Big Data stored in Hadoop provides some much needed flexibility. Sure, using Hive or HBase you can perform some of those operations, but there are other alternatives that may suit your needs better, such as the Big SQL utility. My latest article on this tool is provided here:

SQL is a practical querying language, but is has limitations. Big SQL enables you to run complex queries on non-tabular data and query it with an SQL-like language. The difference with Big SQL is that you are accessing data that may be non-tabular, and may in fact not be based upon a typical SQL database structure. Using Big SQL, you can import and process large volume data sets, including by taking the processed output of other processing jobs within InfoSphere BigInsights™ to turn that information into easily query-able data. In this article, we look at how you can replace your existing infrastructure and queries with Big SQL, and how to take more complex queries and convert them to make use of your Big SQL environment.

Process big data with Big SQL in InfoSphere BigInsights.