The Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Sqoop as a Top-Level Project

[this announcement is also available online at http://s.apache.org/mU]

Open Source big data tool used for efficient bulk transfer between Apache Hadoop and structured datastores.

Forest Hill, MD --The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Sqoop has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

 Designed to efficiently transfer bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured datastores such as relational databases, Apache Sqoop allows the import of data from external datastores and enterprise data warehouses into Hadoop Distributed File System or related systems like Apache Hive and HBase.

 "The Sqoop Project has demonstrated its maturity by graduating from the Apache Incubator," explained Arvind Prabhakar, Vice President of Apache Sqoop. "With jobs transferring data on the order of billions of rows, Sqoop is proving its value as a critical component of production environments."

 Building on the Hadoop infrastructure, Sqoop parallelizes data transfer for fast performance and best utilization of system and network resources. In addition, Sqoop allows fast copying of data from external systems to Hadoop to make data analysis more efficient and mitigates the risk of excessive load to external systems. 

 "Connectivity to other databases and warehouses is a critical component for the evolution of Hadoop as an enterprise solution, and that's where Sqoop plays a very important role" said Deepak Reddy, Hadoop Manager at Coupons.com. "We use Sqoop extensively to store and exchange data between Hadoop and other warehouses like Netezza. The power of Sqoop also comes in the ability to write free-form queries against structured databases and pull that data into Hadoop."

 "Sqoop has been an integral part of our production data pipeline" said Bohan Chen, Director of the Hadoop Development and Operations team at Apollo Group. "It provides a reliable and scalable way to import data from relational databases and export the aggregation results to relational databases."

 Since entering the Apache Incubator in June 2011, Sqoop was quickly embraced as an ideal SQL-to-Hadoop data transfer solution. The Project provides connectors for popular systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server and DB2, and also allows for the development of drop-in connectors that provide high speed connectivity with specialized systems like enterprise data warehouses.

 Craig Ling, Director of Business Systems at Tsavo Media, said "We adopted the use of Sqoop to transfer data into and out of Hadoop with our other systems over a year ago. It is straight forward and easy to use, which has opened the door to allow team members to start consuming data autonomously, maximizing the analytical value of our data repositories."

 Availability and Oversight

Apache Sqoop 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. Apache Sqoop source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://sqoop.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty 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 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers 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(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Hortonworks, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit  http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache", "Apache Sqoop", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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[this announcement is also available online at http://s.apache.org/SxF]

Open Source mashup platform provides easy-to-use infrastructure for building and integrating with social media standards including Activity Streams, OpenSocial, W3C Widgets, and more. 

Forest Hill, MD -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Rave has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Rave is an Open Source software mashup platform that allows developers to build and engage with an array of social network technologies such as OpenSocial, Activity Streams, and W3C Widgets. Rave's lightweight and extensible approach to robust personalization and collaboration capabilities supports a simple model for integration across other platforms, services and solutions.

"Internet social platforms, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have shaped the expectations of today's users; creating an onslaught of demand for pervasive social integration within both consumer and enterprise applications," said Matthew B. Franklin, Vice President of Apache Rave and Lead Software Engineer at The MITRE Corporation. "Developers today are constantly faced with the need to deliver low-cost, scalable, modularized applications with deep-rooted social capabilities. Apache Rave is the first open source project chartered to deliver a lightweight, flexible, widget-based platform to meet these demands."

Apache Rave bundles the efforts of several independent Open Source initiatives that address similar functionality and requirements into a single, enterprise-grade platform that easily scales across federated application integrations, social intranets, and multi-channel social communities with enhanced personalization and customized content delivery.

Developed on open standards, Apache Rave is collaboratively supported by individuals from a wide range of corporations, non-commercial organizations, and institutes from around the world. Seeded by code donations from The MITRE Corporation, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, SURFnet, OSS Watch, Hippo, and numerous individual developers; interest in Apache Rave continues, and the Project welcomes new participants to its growing community.

"Apache Rave takes the good bits from traditional Portals, leaves out whatever made them so heavy-weight and adds modern web technologies like OpenSocial, Widgets, Social Networking, Mobile delivery and Content Services. Rave has already proven to be a platform not to be underestimated. Hippo is proud to be an initiator and participant of this project, and plans to make Rave an integral part of its context-aware content delivery platform", said Ate Douma, Apache Rave incubating Champion and Chief Architect for open-source CMS vendor Hippo.

"The Apache Rave project delivers a perfect platform for our personalized University Portal. Together with SURFnet we hope to develop, integrate and use all possible OpenSocial aspects to benefit our Academic community to the fullest," said Sander Liemberg, Project Manager at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

"As participants in Apache Rave, we are very interested in applying its capabilities to managing scientific collaborations and access to computing resources. Rave is also interesting because of its capacity to be extended by developers: Rave provides a packaged, out-of-the box experience, but we are also trying to ensure it is can also serve as a starting point for developers who wish to extend its capabilities," said Marlon Pierce, Science Gateway Group Lead at Indiana University and Apache Rave PMC Member. "In particular, we at Indiana University are taking the specialized requirements of the National Science Foundation XSEDE Science Gateway program."

Since entering the Apache Incubator in March 2011, the Apache Rave project has successfully produced several code releases in preparation of its first production-ready, v1.0 release. In addition, Apache Rave recently received an honorable mention in the 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year awards.

"We are pleased to have been a founding member of the Apache Rave community and are excited for the future of the project. Rave will be a cornerstone capability for our internal and external users, and we look forward to the continued collaboration and co-development with the community," said Joel Jacobs, Chief Information Officer, The MITRE Corporation.

Availability and Oversight

Apache Rave 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. Apache Rave source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://rave.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty 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 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers 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(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Hortonworks, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit  http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache", "Apache Rave", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

The first Apache BarCamp Washington, D.C. will be held on May 19 2012.

 If you will be in or around the Washington, D.C. area at that time, do sign up and join us!

 As with all Apache BarCamps, there will be a mix of Apache and non-Apache talks given based on who comes and the topics that interest them - with an emphasis on sharing knowledge and having a fun time. For more details and/or to sign up, please take a look at our event site[1].  If you have specific questions feel free to email the planning group <apachebarcampdc@googlegroups.com>.

 We are also wanting a few more sponsors, so if the D.C. market is interesting to your company and you'd like to find out some sponsoring details, contact us at <apachebarcampdc@googlegroups.com>.

 Otherwise, if you can't join us in the Washington D.C. area, but you're interested in helping run an Apache BarCamp or Hackathon in your home town, find out more about getting involved in small events at <small-events-discuss@apache.org>. 

 Thanks!

 --the Apache Conference Committee

The Apache Software Foundation will be participating in the Google Summer of Code again this year as a mentoring organization.

Google Summer of Code is a program where students work on open source projects backed by a stipend granted by Google. The Apache Software Foundation has been participating in the program since its inception in 2005.

Each year, 30-40 students are guided by volunteer mentors from various Apache communities. During the summer they learn what it means to participate in a diverse open source community and develop open source software "The Apache Way". Many of past students are now active contributors to our projects.

This year we hope to build on our previous successes and again build student interest and enthusiasm in The Apache Software Foundation. Our list of project ideas (at http://s.apache.org/gsoc2012tasks) already contains over 100 ideas spanning more than 25 Apache projects. But that's only what we have come up with. A lot of students have their very own itch to scratch and approach our projects with their own ideas.

If you are enrolled as a university student and always wanted to get involved with Apache, here's is your chance. Browse our ideas list, approach the projects you are most interested in, discuss your ideas, get involved, code the summer away, and at the end, get a nice paycheck from Google!