Yugabyte raises $48 million for distributed SQL databases

Yugabyte, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, announced a $48 million funding round to support its open source, SQL database business.

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, an open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, internet-scale applications. The company says enterprise adoption of YugabyteDB continues to accelerate, particularly in the e-commerce, financial services and telecommunications verticals where geographic data distribution, transactional capabilities and horizontal scalability are critical for systems of record. Yugabyte customers include Hudson River Trading, Kroger, Narvar, Turvo, Manetu and Xignite, among others.

Yugabyte is building out its engineering, DevOps and support staff in India, Russia and Canada. To turbo-charge these efforts, it recently acquired India-based Falarica.io to accelerate its development and recruiting efforts in the APAC region. The company is also expanding its sales teams in EMEA and APAC because of strong demand for its open source distributed SQL database, and related products and services.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation by Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. Coming on the heels of a $30 million capital raise announced in June 2020, the round brings Yugabyte’s total funding to $103 million. The funding will be used to expand Yugabyte’s R&D, sales and customer functions in the EMEA and APAC markets. To support its aggressive expansion plans, Yugabyte will double its headcount in 2021.

“Today’s business environment demands flexibility and elasticity from database solutions, and distributed SQL is now critical for any organization where developer productivity and application uptime are top priorities. YugabyteDB makes something as fundamental and feature rich as PostgreSQL truly cloud native, resilient, elastic, and distributed,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Co-Founder and President, Yugabyte. “With companies of all kinds accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, technologies that help them accelerate, like YugabyteDB, are in high demand. This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets.”

https://www.yugabyte.com/

Read More

Oracle's X8M Exadata Cloud Service scales to 4,600 CPU cores

 Oracle introduced its latest iteration of Exadata Cloud Service, promising the highest performance for challenging transaction processing and data analytics projects via its own infrastructure in 26 global cloud regions.

Oracle says its latest generation Exadata Cloud Service, called X8M, supports relational databases that are 20X bigger than possible to run on AWS today with RDS or Aurora—and bests both AWS RDS and Aurora by 25 times in CPU scaling.

With Exadata Cloud Service X8M, Oracle Databases deployed on Exadata Cloud Service X8M can scale up to 4,600 CPU Cores, 44 TB DRAM, 96 TB persistent memory, 1.6 PB flash, and 25 PB of database capacity. 

“As an increasing number of organizations shift their important workloads to the cloud, they have found that many cloud databases have performance, availability and scaling limitations,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. “With today’s announcement, Oracle enables customers to run any business-critical database workload—including the largest and most compute and memory-intensive workloads—with dramatically faster performance, higher scalability and elasticity, and lower costs than any other cloud provider. The new generation of Oracle’s Exadata Cloud Service is based on the proven Exadata platform that is already in use by 86 percent of the Fortune Global 100 to run their most demanding workloads.”

Oracle Exadata X8M, the new platform for Exadata Cloud Service, features Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) from databases to Intel Optane Persistent Memory in smart storage servers, completely bypassing the OS, IO, and network software stacks. This enables 2.5 times higher transaction processing IOs, and 10 times better IO latency than the previous industry-leading Exadata Cloud Service release. Database IOs are 50 times faster than Amazon AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) using all-flash storage. RDMA runs over a new, ultra-fast, 100Gbs RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) network fabric for the highest analytics throughput. Exadata Cloud Service X8M also features a new generation of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) that delivers greatly enhanced application transparent database scale-out and high availability for all types of database workloads. In addition, fully-active Oracle Data Guard database replicas offload SQL reads and writes while providing cloud-automated disaster protection within and across regions.

https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-introduces-exadata-cloud-service-x8m-101520.html

Read More

AWS launches Timestream, a serverless time series database for IoT

 Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon Timestream, a new time series database for IoT and operational applications that can scale to process trillions of time series events per day up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases.  

Amazon Timestream saves customers effort and expense by keeping recent data in-memory and moving historical data to a cost-optimized storage tier based upon user-defined policies, while its query processing gives customers the ability to access and combine recent and historical data transparently across tiers with a single query, without needing to specify explicitly in the query whether the data resides in the in-memory or cost-optimized tier. 

“What we hear from customers is that they have a lot of insightful data buried in their industrial equipment, website clickstream logs, data center infrastructure, and many other places, but managing time series data at scale is too complex, expensive, and slow,” said Shawn Bice, VP, Databases, AWS. “Solving this problem required us to build something entirely new. Amazon Timestream provides a serverless database service that is purpose-built to manage the scale and complexity of time series data in the cloud, so customers can store more data more easily and cost effectively, giving them the ability to derive additional insights and drive better business decisions from their IoT and operational monitoring applications.”

Amazon Timestream is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), with availability in additional regions in the coming months.

https://aws.amazon.com/timestream

Read More

Google Cloud simplifies cross-region replica for Cloud SQL

Google introduced a simplified cross-region replication capability for Cloud SQL customers.

The capability allows applications and databases to quickly restart service in another available region if a Google Cloud region fails.

Cloud SQL cross-region replication, which is available for MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines, simplifies the creation of a fully managed read replica in a different region than that of the primary instance.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/introducing-cross-region-replica-for-cloud-sql

Read More

Couchbase raises $105 million in Series G for NoSQL database

Couchbase, which offers a NoSQL database, raised $105 million in its Series G round of fundraising.

The new funding round was led by GPI Capital, also included oversubscribed participation from existing investors Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Adams Street Partners, and Mayfield.

Couchbase said its customer base now exceeds 500 enterprises, including over 30% of the Fortune 100. In its latest fiscal year, the company reports over 70% total contract value growth, 50%+ new business growth, and 35%+ growth in average subscription deal size.  The company has nearly $100M in committed annual recurring revenue.

“To be competitive today, enterprises must transform digitally and use technology to get closer to their customers and improve the productivity of their workforces.  To do so, they require a cloud-native database built specifically to support modern web, mobile and IoT applications.  Application developers and enterprise architects rely on Couchbase to enable agile application development on a platform that performs at scale, from the public cloud to the edge, and provides operational simplicity and reliability,” said Couchbase President and CEO Matt Cain. “More and more, the largest companies in the world truly run their businesses on Couchbase, architecting their most business-critical applications on our platform.  This has become even more pronounced today as all companies are closely evaluating their digital strategies while carefully managing their capital allocation plans. Completing this funding round in the current climate is a testament to the importance of modern databases and the relevance of Couchbase as we continue our path to becoming a large, public company.”

Couchbase is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Read More

Facebook open sources LogDevice data store

Facebook is committing to the open source community its LogDevice distributed data store for sequential data.

LogDevice was originally developed and currently deployed within Facebook for a variety of workloads, including event streaming, replication pipelines, transaction logs, and deferred work journals. LogDevice comes with a command-line administration tool called LDShell.

https://code.fb.com/core-data/open-sourcing-logdevice-a-distributed-data-store-for-sequential-data/

Read More

AWS goes live with Neptune graph database

AWS announced general availability of Amazon Neptune, a fully-managed graph database service.

Amazon Neptune efficiently stores and navigates highly connected data, allowing developers to create sophisticated, interactive graph applications that can query billions of relationships with millisecond latency.

Amazon Neptune is highly available and durable, automatically replicating six copies of data across three Availability Zones and continuously backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Neptune is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and automatically detects and recovers from most database failures in less than 30 seconds. Amazon Neptune also provides advanced security capabilities, including network security through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and encryption at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

“Amazon Neptune is a key part of the toolkit we use to continually expand Alexa’s knowledge graph for our tens of millions of Alexa customers—it’s just Day 1 and we’re excited to continue our work with the AWS team to deliver even better experiences for our customers,” said David Hardcastle, Director of Amazon Alexa, Amazon.

https://aws.amazon.com/neptune

Read More

Oracle debuts Autonomous Database in the Cloud - 1/2 cost of AWS

Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison introduced the first service based on new Oracle Autonomous Database -- a self-managing, self-securing, self-repairing database cloud service called Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud.  The service uses machine learning to deliver performance, security capabilities, and availability with no human intervention, at "half the cost of Amazon Web Services."

The warehouse provisioning service spins up a secure data warehouse with automatic backup, encryption, and a high availability architecture in seconds. The company says its Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud is so fast that guarantees the same workload at half the cost of Amazon Web Services.

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of the Oracle Database without any of the complexities of configuration, tuning, and administration -- even as warehousing workloads and data volumes change.

"This technology changes everything," said Ellison. "The Oracle Autonomous Database is based on technology as revolutionary as the Internet. It patches, tunes, and updates itself. Amazon's databases cost more and do less."

Read More

Larry Ellison claims Oracle 18c is first Autonomous Database

Larry Ellison introduced what he calls "the world's first, 100%, self-driving, self-scaling and self-repairing Autonomous Database.

Oracle 18c, which will be released later this year, uses machine learning to eliminate human labor involved with managing the database. The automation includes upgrades, security patches and tuning to ensure a 99.995% uptime guarantee. Ellison claims this automation will reduce typical AWS Redshift bills by over 50% while delivering significantly better performance. Demos at Oracle World showed 6 ~ to 8X advantage for Oracle compared to AWS.

Some of the new features in Oracle 18c:

1. 4x faster in-memory OLTP access
2. 5x faster RAC for high-concentration OLTP
3. 2X faster in-memory column store
4. 100x faster in-memory analytics for external data
5. 100x faster approximate query processing
6. New machine learning algorithms

Read More

Couchbase Powers Verizon Labs’ Next-Generation Enterprise IoT Platform

Couchbase announced that its NoSQL document-oriented database supports device management capabilities for millions of connected enterprise devices on Verizon Labs’ IoT platform.

The company said its technology was selected to support Verizon’s IoT platform because of its scale of deployment, flexible schema and ease-of-use.  The database enables enterprises to scale quickly to support billions of connected devices and to achieve sub-milliseconds latency lookup.

“Customer experience is the new competitive battlefield for IoT developers and providers,” wrote Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner, et al. “The convergence of IoT and a data-driven approach toward customer experience allows enterprises to use sensor data in real time to offer greater personalization for products and services. It is the data generated by devices; collected at endpoints, gateways and in the cloud; and consumed in analytic applications that will enable enterprises to derive value from participating in IoT.”1

“The future of enterprise success in the Digital Economy will rely heavily on data management as enterprises’ mission-critical applications and devices become increasingly more connected,” said Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO. “Couchbase is enabling some of the world’s most innovative enterprises to harness Verizon’s IoT network data in meaningful ways and to inform important business decisions vital for lasting success.”

http://www.couchbase.com/connect

Read More

MariaDB Raises $9 Million for Open Source Database

MariaDB announced $9 million in venture funding to support its open-source relational database solutions. The company also named  Michael Howard as its CEO and Michael “Monty” Widenius as chief technology officer.

MariaDB, which has offices in Finland and Menlo Park, California, offers an open-source database for SaaS, cloud, and on-premises applications. MariaDB was uilt by the founder and core engineering team behind MySQL. The database powers millions of users on sites like Booking.com and Wikipedia. Moreover, MariaDB is the “M” in LAMP, having displaced MySQL as the default database in the Red Hat and SUSE Linux distributions. MariaDB is also included in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Rackspace and other cloud stacks, and it is the database of choice for IBM POWER8. The company claims over 550 customers in more than 45 countries.

Michael Howard most recently was CEO at C9, which he transformed into one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space, ultimately leading to its acquisition by InsideSales. Previously, Howard was CMO at Greenplum (now Pivotal), the Big Data division of EMC. He was CEO at Ingrian Networks and Outerbay, and VP of the Internet Division at Veritas and of Data Warehousing at Oracle.

Monty Widenius, the creator of both MySQL and MariaDB, has joined the company as CTO. Monty has been advocating open source throughout the industry as well as serving on the boards of MariaDB Corporation and the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organization charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem. Monty developed MySQL, the most widely adopted open source relational database, which was acquired by Oracle as part of the Sun Microsystems purchase in 2010. Monty remains Founder and Open Source Advocate at the MariaDB Foundation.

Intel Capital and California Technology Ventures were among the investors in the $9 Million equity financing.

http://mariadb.com

Blueprint: What’s in Store for the Database in 2016?

Thursday, January 14, 2016  Blueprint, Databases, MariaDB, Start-up  No comments

by Roger Levy, VP of Product at MariaDB In 2015, CIOs focused on DevOps and similar technologies such as containers as a way to improve time to value. During 2016, greater attention will be focused on data analytics and data management as a way to improve the timeliness and quality of business decisions. How best to store and manage data is on the minds of most CIOs as they kick off the New Year. It’s exciting to see that databases, which unde

Read More