Pivotal Software, Inc. is making an appearance at its parent company’s EMC World 2015 summit this week with an updated analytics stack touted as capable of performing certain operations exponentially faster than before. The upgrade is the first major milestone for the spin-off since the release of its core technologies to the open-source ecosystem.

The Pivotal Big Data Suite improves upon that freely-available base with a new cost-based optimizer for the relational component, Greenplum Database, that automatically determines the fastest way to fetch inormation in order to speed requests. The company says that the technology can execute some complex requests up to 100 times faster than the older query mechanism it replaces.

Pivotal is addressing that competition on another front through the inclusion of the new optimizer in its HAWK query language, which strips away the complexity of a full-blown database – along with most of the features – to provide a clean interface for running SQL commands on unstructured information. Like Greenplum, the engine runs on the company’s Hadoop distribution, which has also been enhanced as part of the update.

The version now shipping with Pivotal Big Data Suite is derived from the Open Data Platform, an effort launched in conjunction with the release of its intellectual property to the public domain with the goal of creating a standardized version of the analytics framework. The initiative has come under fire from some Hadoop distributors who argue that it’s divisive to the community and only serves to hamper the development of the project, but Pivotal boasts of new features that demonstrate its efforts are very much moving forward.

The distribution incorporates over half a dozen additional components from the upstream project, most notably Spark, the ultra-fast execution engine that appears poised to replace MapReduce as the default analytics option in Hadoop, and its machine-learning libary. Also included is the Apache Ranger access control tool and Apache Knox gateway from Hortonworks, Inc. – the one major distributor that does support the Open Data Platform – along with new monitoring options and improved orchestration functionality to help the different components work better in concert.