Apache Kylin is a distributed open source online analytics processing (OLAP) engine for interactive analytics Big Data. Apache Kylin has been designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop/Spark. In addition, it easily integrates with BI tools via ODBC driver, JDBC driver, and REST API. It was created by eBay in 2014, graduated to Top Level Project of Apache Software Foundation just one year later, in 2015 and won the Best Open Source Big Data Tool in 2015 as well as in 2016. Currently, it is being used by thousands of companies worldwide as their critical analytics application for Big Data. While other OLAP engines struggle with the data volume, Kylin enables query responses in the milliseconds. It provides sub-second level query latency over datasets scaling to petabytes. It gets its amazing speed by precomputing the various dimensional combinations and the measure aggregates via Hive queries and populating HBase with the results.
The Kylin query engine which can be accessed in Kylin’s user-friendly UI, via an API or via JDBC will leverage the Apache Calcite query processor and HBase features for rapid lookups. Kylin relies upon the Hadoop Eco-system:
Open-source ODBC driver - Kylin’s ODBC driver is built from scratch and works very well with Tableau.