This week’s O’Reilly Strata Conference saw the usual slew of Big Data announcements from around the industry, but a handful of vendors managed to stand out from the crowd despite the overwhelming buzz. The first is Hadoop distributor MapR, which unleashed a string of new and updated products on day 1 of the Santa Clara event.

The most notable addition to the firm’s portfolio is a new Vertica-powered platform that enables business users to run queries against semi-structured and structured data residing in HDFS using familiar SQL syntax. The integrated solution features built-in BI and data visualization capabilities, complemented by the addition YARN support with backward compatibility. That means customers can now run legacy MapReduce clusters in their Hadoop 2.0 deployments, which simplifies migration for slow-moving enterprises and sets MapR’s offering apart from that of rivals such as Cloudera and Hortonworks. The company introduced a single-node cluster configuration dubbed Sandbox to let organizations try out the functionality before committing to purchase.

The day after, an emerging analytics startup called Splice Machine raised $15 million in funding to bolster sales and marketing efforts and accelerate the development of its product, a real-time transactional database that sits on top of Hadoop. Already used by over 50 enterprises, the solution is set to enter beta later this quarter.

Over in the BI arena, SiSense unveiled a new version of its analytics platform that has been optimized to provide a smooth user experience on smartphones and tablets. The release also introduces a number of new features, including support for push notifications and the ability to drill down into specific metrics for a more detailed view of the underlying patterns. Additionally, analysts can now incorporate data from different sources into custom dashboards that can be shared with colleagues directly from within the SiSense interface.