Aster Data, a San Carlos, Calif.-based company is offering a free version of the MapReduce development environment for download, which will allow developers to use the IDE to build apps to analyze big data. MapReduce is a technology that was first used by Google (s goog) for parallel processing of enormous data sets.

The new MapReduce IDE is called Aster Data Developer Express, and it’s a point-and-click visual development environment. Aster, which makes data management software, is hoping that some of the newer companies with copious amounts of data — like social networks and mobile apps  — would start using this IDE, allowing it to cash in the ongoing data mining renaissance.

Aster says  “any developer or analyst that is familiar with the Java (s orcl) programming language can complete a rich analytic application in under an hour using the simple yet powerful Aster Data Developer Express environment in Eclipse.” Aster has lately been pushing its data-analytics server product, nCluster, and the new IDE ties in nicely with its desire to build an Aster ecosystem. According to Aster, “Much of the MapReduce coding, including programming concepts like parallelization and distributed data analysis, is addressed by the IDE without the developer or analyst needing to have expertise in these areas.” Aster notes that apps that would be most ideal for this new IDE should revolve around the ideas of iterative analytics, prediction & optimization apps and ad-hoc analysis apps.

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