Microsoft has acquired Metanautix, a startup company founded by former Google engineer, Theo Vassilakis. Metanautix has created a tool called Quest that enables SQL queries against all kinds of data, regardless of where the data lives. Terms of the deal were not available.
While he was in Google, Vassilakis was the lead in an effort to create a similar tool called Dremel for drilling into all different types of data across different locations using SQL queries. That tool was intended for internal use at Google, but Vassilakis wondered about all the companies without Google’s resources and how they could perform such searches.
Companies continue to generate enormous volumes of information and aspire to be more data-driven in their strategies and operations. But many struggle to bring together their various sources and siloes of data, and only analyze and use a fraction of all the available information. Metanautix’ technology breaks these boundaries to connect the “data supply chain,” no matter what the type, size or location of an organization’s data, according to Microsoft.
With Metanautix technology, IT teams can connect a diversity of their company’s information across private and public clouds, without having to go through the costly and complex process of moving data into a centralized system. The solution can integrate data across traditional data warehouses like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata; open source NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra; as well as business systems like Salesforce.com and wide array of other cloud and on-premises data stores. Key to Metanautix’ approach is making a wide variety of data query-able by SQL, the most widely used data query language – at speed and high scale.
