Breaking down data silos is a challenge enterprises have been trying to overcome for years. Hadapt, a Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up that grew out of work by co-founder Dr. Daniel Abadi at Yale, has made it its core mission to finish the job.

The company’s core platform makes it possible to run both Hadoop and SQL on the same infrastructure. Today it announced a new flexible schema architecture to its platform that essentially allows business analysts to query both traditional, structured corporate data and multi-structured data, such as text and key-value pair data, from a single interface using tried-and-true SQL.

New approach to growing problem

It’s an interesting approach to a real and growing problem. The promise of Hadoop is that the scalable, cost-efficient framework means companies can now afford to store all their data and break down the barriers between existing databases. But in reality at many early adopters Hadoop turns into yet another data silo., limiting Hadoop’s value.

The other challenge many organizations face is finding the elusive “Data Scientist” who is experienced with MapReduce and otherwise manipulating data in Hadoop.  Hadapt is tackling both challenges with today’s announcement.

“A key concept in building the ‘Analytic DBMS for Hadoop’ was to provide the interface and performance of a relational database while maintaining the scalability and flexibility of Hadoop,” said said Hadapt CEO Justin Borgman. “With the release of Flexible Schema, Hadapt enables Schemaless SQL over non-relational data stores, providing analysts with the only SQL-based solution for querying multi-structured data.”

Jeff Kelly, an analyst with Wikibon who’s research focuses on Big Data, said the data silo problem is a real one that significantly limits an enterprise’s ability to drive value from analytics

“Whether due to acquisitions or departmental data mart deployments, most large enterprise have a data sprawl and data silo problem. Getting business analysts a unified view of all of an organization’s data is therefore a huge challenge,” said Kelly. “Bringing all that data into a common platform and providing familiar tools to allow a unified view would be a huge benefit to business analysts.”