Kylin?is an open source analytics platform from the house of eBay, designed to run analytics on Hadoop using SQL compatible tools, thereby allowing developers and power users with prior knowledge of analytical services to run multi-dimensional analytics.

Kylin is an important bridge for power users who not only want to continue to use their favourite tool like Excel, Power BI, or Tableau?to create and execute predictive analytical models based on the principals of OLAP, but at the same time also want to leverage the performance of Hadoop in quickly processing large volumes of data at sub-second rates. The platform has since been transformed into an Apache Incubator project and various production houses within eBay are actually running it to perform analytics on large scale datasets. It is designed to provide better performance than Hive?queries for the same dataset and works seamlessly with well-known data visualization tools such as Tableau and Excel, as well as third-party applications. Most ANSI SQL queries are also supported.

Users can run multi-dimensional OLAP queries on 10+ billion rows of data in less than a second. From the perspective of security, Kylin supports integration with LDAP, allowing seamless access for your active directory users and also supports access control at a cube or project level.

The Kylin platform stack comprises of the Kylin Core, which is comprised of the fundamental framework components of Kylin to run the stack that includes the query engine, metadata engine, engine for running the jobs and storage. It also provides the RESTful services to interact with the platform. In addition to Core, Kylin has an integration layer that supports the ETL jobs and provides monitoring and alerting support, an extension layer that allows plugins for extending the security model for single sign-on, storage and other functions and a UI layer that allows developers to create custom interfaces on top of Kylin Core.