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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

I know the death of drill blog was normal marketing by Starburst, but I'm kinda agreeing with them.

Drill is one of those technologies that people don't think to turn to today if they're starting a new project.

What does Drill offer that would make it out-compete the other candidates for a fresh new project?

For me the ease of use and versatility. Having tried the others, Presto, Impala, Dremio, none really work as well for my use cases. The fact that I can write a query to join data from an API with a PCAP, with zero schema prep is really incredible. I've also always appreciated that Drill uses standard SQL rather than a proprietary dialect of SQL is a huge win because it means the learning curve is muj lower.

Bottom line, a user can unzip Drill and with very minimal work, explore their data no matter where it is, with minimal config. This works as well on a laptop as a big cluster.

A wide variety of sources queryable through standard SQL, including some not found in alternatives. The competition for querying the common data sources is, as you note, stiff! We want to do those well, but also chase the long tail of more obscure systems, interfaces and formats that are out there and still contain stuff people are interested in. Even people who'd like to run query or two before they're required to declare a schema, though admittedly this latter trick is helpful for exploring but no magic wand once you need start doing computation (and data types really do become indispensable).

For me drill is best suite for many reasons. 1. Its simplicity - Simple installation, simple to use, smaller learning curve. Works both in stand alone and in cluster mode. 2. Documentation - Simple and to the point documentation. 3. Support for multiple data sources - It supports almost all required data sources and use same Standard SQL to query data from. Best part is to join multiple data sources (different databases of different types) in a single query 4. Active community - Raise the question and someone is there to help you resolve the issue. 5. Integration options - It provides both JDBC and REST API to connect to drill data store and accesses it.

So for my use case this really fits and I guess it will be for others.

Schema-On-Read, performance, combining the variety of Data Sources in one SQL query?

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