MapReduce is becoming the lingua franca of data scientists, just as SQL has emerged as a standard for database queries, Argyros says.

FORBES: Can MapReduce Be Made Easy?

As part of his PhD thesis, Chris Stolte, his student at Stanford, invented the Polaris technology, now called VizQL, which allows database queries to be generated and represented visually.

FORBES: Tableau Software's Pat Hanrahan on "What Is a Data Scientist?"

The Cascalog system has combined the Cascading system for abstraction of advanced data processing on Hadoop and other systems, the Datalog declarative programming language that is well suited for expressing database queries in an abstract form, and the Clojure language to create a declarative language for queries that can be run on Apache Hadoop.

FORBES: Why Adopting the Declarative Programming Practices Will Improve Your Return from Technology

Your website then queries your database and pulls back all the hardware you carry.

FORBES: DDoS Defense: Preventing business disruption

Google hacking was first popularized by Johnny Long, a penetration tester who created a Google Hacking Database that allowed anyone to add interesting security search queries that might turn up vulnerabilities to exploits like SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting.

FORBES: Researchers Will Turn Google And Bing Into Web Bug Warning System

CouchDB queries are views, which are themselves documents in the database that specify searches.

FORBES: What You Need to Know About NoSQL Databases

While a traditional database, even a very big one, allows for only the simplest, most repetitive queries, a data warehouse is multidimensional, allowing for data to be analyzed using hundreds of variables simultaneously.

FORBES: The Resurrection of NCR