if you're doing joins from hBASE, hdfs, cassandra and redis, then this works. Using it as a be all end all does not suit it. This is not your straight forward magic software that works for all scenarios. One needs to determine the use case to see if Apache Drill fits the needs. 3/4 of the time, usually it does.
I find Qubole is well suited for getting started analyzing data in the cloud without being locked in to a specific cloud vendor's tooling other than the underlying filesystem. Since the data itself is not isolated to any Qubole cluster, it can be easily be collected back into a cloud-vendor's specific tools for further analysis, therefore I find it complementary to any offerings such as Amazon EMR or Google DataProc.
Providing an open selection of all cloud provider instance types with no explanation as to their ideal use cases causes too much confusion for new users setting up a new cluster. For example, not everyone knows that Amazon's R or X-series models are memory optimized, while the C and M-series are for general computation.
I would like to see more ETL tools provided other than DistCP that allow one to move data between Hadoop Filesystems.
From the cluster administration side, onboarding of new users for large companies seems troublesome, especially when trying to create individual cluster per team within the company. Having the ability to debug and share code/queries between users of other teams / clusters should also be possible.
if Presto comes up with more support (ie hbase, s3), then its strongly possible that we'll move from apache drill to prestoDB. However, Apache drill needs more configuration ease, especially when it comes to garbage collection tuning. If apache drill could support also sparkSQL and Flume, then it does change drill into being something more valuable than prestoDB
Personally, I have no issues using Amazon EMR with Hue and Zeppelin, for example, for data science and exploratory analysis. The benefits to using Qubole are that it offers additional tooling that may not be available in other cloud providers without manual installation and also offers auto-terminating instances and scaling groups.
compared to presto, has more support than prestodb. Impala has limitations to what drill can support apache phoenix only supports for hbase. no support for cassandra. Apache drill was chosen, because of the multiple data stores that it supports htat the other 3 do not support. Presto does not support hbase as of yet. Impala does not support query to cassandra
Qubole was decided on by upper management rather than these competitive offerings. I find that Databricks has a better Spark offering compared to Qubole's Zeppelin notebooks.
We like to say that Qubole has allowed for "data democratization", meaning that each team is responsible for their own set of tooling and use cases rather than being limited by versions established by products such as Hortonworks HDP or Cloudera CDH
One negative impact is that users have over-provisioned clusters without realizing it, and end up paying for it. When setting up a new cluster, there are too many choices to pick from, and data scientists may not understand the instance types or hardware specs for the datasets they need to operate on.
