Well sorry my buzzword filter removed half of your sentence. :) I understand that engineers can get excited about async and event driven but these mean absolutely nothing to your endusers. I could implement your service with blocking IO and non-event driven code and still get the same performance. It simply does not matter that much. The key to Hadoop's success is scalability and predictable performance. Don't get me wrong, I think Hadoop is one of the worst ecosystems I have ever seen in my entire life, the code quality makes me cry sometimes, but putting all these aside, projects like PrestoDB making Hadoop viable and keeping it alive in the long run. Your project looks interesting but without extensive performance testing and proving that your TCO is lower than Hadoop's, and having the same features as Hive, PrestoDB does will be really hard to break in to this market. Again, I would be the happiest person to see something more sane than Hadoop on the market.