AsterixDB—the multi-school effort to build a highly scalable data management system that can store, index and manage semi-structured data—has officially become an Apache project, graduating from the Apache Incubator program of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Now dubbed Apache AsterixDB, the system was co-developed by faculty, researchers, staff and students primarily at UC Irvine and UC Riverside, including Bren Chair and Computer Science Professor Michael Carey and Computer Science Professor Chen Li.

According to the project’s website, since there is no open source parallel database systems (relational or otherwise) currently available to developers today, AsterixDB aims to fill this need. The project is intended to usher in a wave of Big Data Management Software (BDMS). It began as a large National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored project in 2009 to combine the best of the parallel database world, the Apache Hadoop world and the semi-structured data world. The team launched the first AsterixDB open source release in 2013 and it joined the Apache Incubator in 2015.

Some of the project’s key features include a flexible data model; distributed storage and transaction support; fast data ingestion; scalable, data-parallel query execution runtime; indexing for various data types; support of similarity queries; and a powerful declarative query language.

The ASF is a nonprofit organization that provides a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication and business infrastructure. The ASF Incubator helps new projects join the foundation, with graduation from the ASF Incubator being a highly selective and rigorous process.