Saying Cloudbase did not make it to the real world is overstating things. We use Cloudbase in a production capacity at Business.com, and it is heavily used by a number of other companies. Cloudbase has a robust jdbc connector and novel column indexing and join optimization not provided by Hive. We were eager to give a presentation on Cloudbase at the Hadoop Summit but for unknown reasons our presentation proposal was not accepted. Anyone who's interested in learning more should check our sourceforge site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloudbase/

Leo Dagum

".... in classic Hadoop fashion, it will undoubtedly evoke some sort of fauna."

What? You mean like "CloudBase"?