Good news for Big Data users: Cloudera recently released the second and final beta for Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop version 4 (CDH4), meaning that the official CDH4 release is coming soon.

If you aren’t already using CDH, Cloudera offers the leading open-source distribution of the fast, agile, and reliable distributed  computing platform changing the way enterprises interact with data, Apache Hadoop. Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop provides a free, integrated stack consisting of the most useful software in the Hadoop ecosystem tested to work together and integrated with the widest range of databases, hardware, and end-user tools. All of the software is open-source to prevent vendor lock-in and to draw from the large Apache community.

CDH4 will have a number of improvements on the current CDH3 distribution. Key members of the Hadoop ecosystem such as the Hadoop database HBase, Hadoop Distributed File System, the parallel processing framework MapReduce, distributed log data management service Flume, and compression performance will all be improved. Availability will also be higher thanks to better failure handling, a high-availability namenode, multi-version support, and better job isolation. Broader browser and BI support along with expanded APIs improve CDH4′s usability, and  multiple namespaces and slotless resource management improve utilization. CDH4 also offers enhanced security and better extensibility allowing  developers to create new kinds of real-time big data applications.

This second beta includes all of the major changes to CDH3, and is currently available for free download here. If you want to wait for CDH4 to reach General Availability, you can also download CDH 3 on the same page.