The big bottleneck for Big Data is application development. Today developers of are getting some significant help with the GA release of Sqrrl Enterprise.

Sqrrl, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company commercializing Apache Accumulo, has added a number of enhancements to version 1.1 of its security-focused Big Data analytic platform specifically aimed at simplifying the application development process. These include the ability to convert Accumulo key/value pairs into hierarchical JSON documents to streamline data models and structures, according to Sqrrl. The company also added better installation tools and command-line shells, new configurable indexing capabilities, and the ability to ingest streaming data.

There are also security enhancements, such as better integration with Active Directory, Kerberos and LDAP, as well as new analytics capabilities including full-text search, SQL support and graph analysis functions. Sqrrl is aiming its platform at developers in financial services firms and government agencies looking to build security-focused Big Data applications, as well as to application developers in healthcare and other highly regulated industries that demand fine-grained security and access control capabilities.

Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante said Big Data application development is still largely a complex, manual process, but new platforms like Sqrrl Enterprise are poised to change that.

“Developing Big Data applications is complicated and Sqrrl Enterprise substantially simplifies application development for emerging large scale apps,” Vellante said. “Wikibon practitioners are excited about Sqrrl toolsets because they enable organizations to co-mingle sensitive datasets on a single Big Data platform through fine-grained cell-level security controls. Scale, performance, security and flexibility will define the next wave of Big Data application development, and companies like Sqrrl are leading the way.”

Sqrrl CTO and Co-Founder Adam Fuschs recently recorded a series of whiteboard videos on theCUBE demonstrating how Sqrrl Enterprise addresses cell-level security and enables Big Data application development.  See our initial coverage here, and catch Fuschs’ demonstration in the video below.