Amazon has announced the launch of its Kinesis Analytics for its AWS cloud platform. The new service is designed to let developers continuously pass SQL queries against their streaming data.
Kinesis Analytics is an upgrade of the original Amazon Kinesis that was available on the AWS cloud to ease building of streaming data solutions. Unlike its predecessor, the new analytics service lets developers run SQL queries with the inflow of data.
“Kinesis Analytics will analyse a sample of the incoming records and then propose a suitable schema,” writes Jeff Barr, chief evangelist, AWS, in a blog post. “You can use it as-is, or you can fine-tune it to better reflect your actual data model. Once the schema has been defined, you can use the built-in SQL editor (complete with syntax checking and easy testing against live data). You can configure Kinesis Analytics to route the results of the query to up to four destinations including Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, or an Amazon Kinesis Stream.”
Amazon Kinesis Analytics leaves behind the traditional SQL model by offering an easy query processing model. This model comes with three different types of windows, namely tumbling, sliding and custom. All these windows reduce the complexity of data flowing from one channel to another and deliver a simpler method to examine data online.
Developers need to write a pair of cooperating SQL statements to build your Kinesis Analytics application. However, the new service does not require any additional SDK installation on the server end.
“Your SQL statements can also JOIN the records to reference data that originates in S3. This can be handy when you want to enhance or modify the records to include additional, perhaps more descriptive, information,” Barr explains.
Initially, Amazon has launched its Kinesis Analytics in some parts of Europe and the US. However, it would soon be available worldwide to ease the analysis of streaming data.
