From <a href="http://www.hadapt.com/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.hadapt.com/about</a> (very slow to load right now), two of the guys are Daniel Abadi and Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski. They worked on HadoopDB [1], which was an attempt at creating a parallel DB on top of Hadoop, that would leverage mapreduce scale, while taking advantage of the benefits of relational databases. I think the hope was to have some sort of system capable of taking on Vertica.<p>Looks like they've turned it into a product. Ah, more coverage here [2].<p>1: <a href="http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html" rel="nofollow">http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html</a>
2: <a href="http://www.dbms2.com/2011/03/23/hadapt-commercialized-hadoopdb/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dbms2.com/2011/03/23/hadapt-commercialized-hadoop...</a>