Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on so-called NoSQL approaches to deal with the unstructured data that traditional relational database solutions were struggling with. And NoSQL is typically associated with the idea of big data, where data sets are so large that they are difficult to work with, requiring new tools and approaches.

Business intelligence company Jaspersoft just published a big data index, which gauges demand for several of the most popular big data sources based on the number of open-source connector downloads it measures on Jasperforge.org.

Jaspersoft tracked more than 15,000 open-source connector downloads for more than 10 databases from January 2011 to January 2012. Interestingly, while Hadoop-based databases like HBase and Hive received the most downloads. MongoDB, a NoSQL database created by 10gen, has seen demand grow more than 200 percent, in large part because it is easy to use but lacks in tooling.

Note: As with any statistics, take these with a grain of salt.