History[09][10][11][06][12]

Sqrrl development began in 2011. As a company, it was founded by Ely Kahn and Oren J. Falkowitz who worked in cybersecurity before creating Sqrrl. Sqrrl was built on Apache Accumulo. Customers using Sqrrl came from both the private and public sector.

In January of 2018, Sqrrl was acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Existing users of Sqrrl were able to continue using the software without any changes. In late November 2018, Sqrrl co-founder Ely Kahn (who is now a Security Strategist at AWS) commented on the release of AWS Security Hub, which includes visualizations and security remediation recommendations. However, there were no statements made explicitly about Sqrrl's integration with AWS.

Concurrency Control[13]

Concurrency control is implemented in Sqrrl in a way that is not publicly known. Sqrrl supports concurrency control by doing atomic updates on data entities.

Data Model[13][14][15][16]

After data is ingested, the Sqrrl Enterprise product details each piece at a cell level. Data can be a key/value pair or a field in a JSON document. Sqrrl then uses secondary indexing techniques to store the data in Apache Accumulo in its native form. This flat architecture allows Sqrrl to handle data of different structures.

In 2016, a presentation by Sqrrl stated that the version of Accumulo used by Sqrrl Enterprise stores sorted key-value pairs. The data model itself uses raw events and linked data. Sqrrl is also considered a graph DBMS because it represents data to users in a graphical format and is schema-free. Custom iterators for Accumulo developed by Sqrrl allow users to complete graph analysis on the data.

Indexes[13]

Sqrrl has secondary indexes implemented in a way unknown to the public.

Query Compilation[17]

Sqrrl converts SQL queries into Accumulo iterators.

Query Interface[16]

Sqrrl Enterprise offers users a proprietary query language called SqrrlQL that is integrated with the cell-level security concept. Users are able to execute SQL-like queries (key-value), full-text queries, or graph searches.

Storage Model[13]

System Architecture[16]

With native Hadoop integration, Sqrrl Enterprise ingests data. It is encrypted and labeled, then indexed and stored in Sqrrl's version of Apache Accumulo within the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Sqrrl and HDP, together, store multi-structured data in its native format. This allows users of Sqrrl to make queries of many different kinds.