Project Phoenix Internal Incubation

A small team at Cloudera, led by Mike Percy and Todd Lipcon, began the internal development of a new distributed storage engine, codenamed 'Project Phoenix', aiming to bridge the gap between OLTP and OLAP workloads.

Significance

This marked the foundational conceptualization and initial engineering efforts that would eventually lead to Kudu. It was the birth of the idea to combine the best aspects of columnar storage with mutability.