In my view, the new development that we see now is building links to a Hadoop platform. One such development is building ODBC drivers that allow windows tools to access a Hadoop platform. An an example, one may think of Excel accessing tables on Hive. Think for a second on the possibilities: one may still use Excel whereas the actual handling takes place on hadoop and the files are stored under Hive. One such example is a wonderful ODBC driver that is taken from MapR with its 64 bit compagnion here . These ODBC drivers are developed by MapR, but I was able to use them in connection with a Pivotal framework. It took a bit of trial and error, but I got it going. I had to find out whether my office was a 32 bit or a 64 bit. I then remembered that the first 64 bits office version was 2010 and mine was 2007. Hence I took the 32 bit. Then I remembered, Pivotal uses an older version of Hive, so I used the Hive 1 version of the ODBC driver. All in all, the connectio was successful and I could access the Pivotal environment from Excel. Wht a view!