MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced the availability of a native Tableau Connector for Apache Drill on MapR, giving users faster access to large and complex data via tight integration between Tableau and Apache Drill. 

“Strong demand from our joint customers led to this tighter integration,” said Robert Green,  director of product management at Tableau. “Tableau and Apache Drill share a common view on self-service data discovery and this development opens up new avenues for users of both technologies.”

Apache Drill is a supported data source for Tableau bringing more robust integration compared to generic ODBC. The MapR Tableau Connector for Apache Drill delivers tighter metadata integration between Tableau and Apache Drill and brings advanced analytics capabilities that leverage Tableau Sets to Apache Drill users.

Additionally, Tableau users on Macs can now access Apache Drill.

“Tableau users will experience productivity improvements as they can incorporate newer and complex data types like JSON faster into their analysis using Apache Drill,” said Geneva Lake, vice president, alliances and channels, MapR Technologies. “Advanced analytic functions in Tableau are now available with Apache Drill, opening up new possibilities for business analysts.”

Drill has been recognized as one of the best in open-source Big Data technologies, and the interest in, the popularity of, and the adoption of Drill continues to grow. Thousands of users have downloaded Drill and numerous organizations have it in production, interactively analyzing up to PBs of data.