I work at Cloudera (although not on Impala). I work on HDFS.
Impala was about creating a low-latency SQL engine for Hadoop, so that queries could be done interactively by a human at a keyboard. This is something that you don't really get with Hive (despite all the recent hype) because it simply is too slow, and has high startup costs. That's unlikely to change in the future because of the overhead of spinning up JVMs, starting MapReduce jobs, etc.
It seems like you are trying to target the OLTP market. That's a difficult market to crack. A lot of the value of things like Oracle and Microsoft SQL server is not in the database itself, but in the surrounding software. Performance is nice, but unless you can get orders of magnitude, it's very difficult to compete.
Will anybody ever bridge OLTP and OLAP? The last people who claimed to be trying to do that were Drawn to Scale, and we all know how that turned out. I think it's better to focus on doing one thing well.
Impala was about creating a low-latency SQL engine for Hadoop, so that queries could be done interactively by a human at a keyboard. This is something that you don't really get with Hive (despite all the recent hype) because it simply is too slow, and has high startup costs. That's unlikely to change in the future because of the overhead of spinning up JVMs, starting MapReduce jobs, etc.
It seems like you are trying to target the OLTP market. That's a difficult market to crack. A lot of the value of things like Oracle and Microsoft SQL server is not in the database itself, but in the surrounding software. Performance is nice, but unless you can get orders of magnitude, it's very difficult to compete.
Will anybody ever bridge OLTP and OLAP? The last people who claimed to be trying to do that were Drawn to Scale, and we all know how that turned out. I think it's better to focus on doing one thing well.
Good luck.