Quest Software Extends NoSQL Olive Branch

The company unveiled Toad for Cloud Databases, which allows an IT organization to use SQL to query a database source that relies on a much lower-level interface.

Currently in beta, Toad for Cloud Databases supports Amazon DB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache Hbase and any data source that supports Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers. In the near future, Quest Software plans to add support for Apache Cassandra and Apache Hadoop data sources as well.

According to Guy Harrison, director of research and development for Quest Software, the goal should be to allow users to easily access information regardless of the type of database being used. To that end, Toad for Cloud Databases provides a graphical user interface that makes it simple to query both SQL and non-SQL databases.

Harrison said the GUI is the missing component to most noSQL database offerings that have a tendency to make it easy to get data into them, but difficult for users to extract information.