AsterixDB is a highly scalable data management system that can store,index, and manage semi-structured data, e.g., much like MongoDB, butit also supports a full-power query language with the expressiveness of SQL (and more). Unlike analytics engines like Hive or Spark, it stores and manages data, so AsterixDB can exploit its knowledge of data partitioning and the availability of indexes to avoid always scanning data set(s) to process queries. Somewhat surprisingly, there is no open source parallel database system (relational or otherwise) available to developers today -- AsterixDB aims to fill this need.
The current version of AsterixDB was co-developed by a team of faculty, staff, and students at UC Irvine and UC Riverside. The project was initiated as a large NSF-sponsored project in 2009, the goal of which was to combine the best ideas from the parallel database world, the then new Hadoop world, and the semi-structured (e.g., XML/JSON) data world in order to create a next-generation BDMS. A first informal open source release was made four years later, in June of 2013, under the Apache Software License 2.0. AsterixDB was accepted into the Apache Incubator and began Incubation as of Febuary of 2015.