IBM claims that Big SQL provides robust SQL support for the Hadoop ecosystem:

- it has a scalable architecture;

- it supports SQL and data types available in SQL '92, plus it has some additional capabilities;

- it supports JDBC and ODBC client drivers;

- it has efficient handling of "point queries" (and we'll get to what that means);

- there are a wide variety of data sources and file formats for HDFS and HBase that it supports;

- And it, although is not open source, it does interoperate well with the open source ecosystem within Hadoop.