Business.com has announced the availability of CloudBase, a high-performance data warehouse system that scales horizontally on commodity hardware or a cloud computing network. Built on top of a map-reduce architecture, this technology enables business analysts using ANSI SQL to directly query large-scale log files arising in web site, telecommunications or IT operations. Now even small businesses will be able to quickly analyze log data without the cost and complexity of maintaining large relational database management system (RDBMS) clusters.

"We developed CloudBase to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of transforming terabyte-scale web log files into actionable insights for improving user experience and business results," said Paul Dagum, Chief Scientist and Strategy Officer, R.H. Donnelley Interactive (RHDi). "By inventing, developing and releasing open source technology like CloudBase, Business.com continues to demonstrate both our leadership in the online space and our overall focus on helping businesses quickly find solutions to their most pressing challenges."

Web log analysis is critical to understanding and improving user experience and site performance. Given the cost constraints faced by small- to mid-sized companies in today's economy, Business.com chose to make CloudBase available to the general public as a free, open-source application. "Key insights about site user behavior and performance remain out of reach for small internet and ecommerce sites because of the exorbitant amount of time and expense necessary to go from flat files to ETL to a performance-ready RDBMS cluster. We launched CloudBase as a free, open-source application to open-up this black box for small- and mid-sized businesses," said Dagum.

CloudBase is developed to Hadoop's map-reduce implementation. But, unlike other map-reduce approaches, it does not create or require the use of a programming language on top of map-reduce. CloudBase creates a database system directly on flat files and converts input ANSI SQL expressions into map-reduce programs for processing flat files. Existing applications such as reporting programs, data mining applications using ANSI SQL, business intelligence tools, and OLAP systems can use CloudBase to access massive log files without the user having to rewrite the application program.