Hadoop has proven effective for big data problems by moving analysis to where the data resides rather than moving data to systems for analysis. HAWQ is a SQL query engine that combines the scalability of Hadoop with the performance of parallel SQL databases by allowing SQL queries to run directly on data stored in HDFS. Tests showed HAWQ was tens to hundreds of times faster than other Hadoop query engines for common analytics workloads. HAWQ provides SQL capabilities, elastic fault tolerance, and the ability to scale to petabytes of data.