NuoDB CEO Barry Morris (pictured above) seems girded for blowback.”The rules from Codd are intended to be obvious. If [the new rules] were strange or oriented around a particular product, they’d be self-serving, but they’re not. We want to say: ‘let’s stop screwing around with incremental database improvements. If you were to design your own requirements for an ideal 21st century database, what would they be?’ This is what we came up with. What’s missing? We want the conversation.”

NuoDB co-founder and CTO Jim Starkey

Cambridge, Mass.-based NuoDB  was founded by Jim Starkey, a database pioneer who piloted Digital Equipment Corp.’s RdB database (now part of Oracle) and Interbase (acquired by Borland) and is responsible for many object database innovations. He also founded Netrastructure which was acquired by MySQL, the popular open-source database, that is now also owned by Oracle (sorcl). He is now listed as founder and senior advisor to NuoDB. He also used to be CTO.

A cloud database management system, according to NuoDB, is a superset of the tried-and-true relational model. Below is a truncated version of  NuoDB’s 12 rules of Cloud Database Management System (CDMS). The unabbreviated list is here.

1. Elastic Scale-out for Extreme Performance
A CDMS must deliver capacity on demand by adding/deleting computational and storage resources in a running database.  It must be able to handle very high transaction volumes and petabytes of data as needed and scale back “gracefully” when those resources are no longer needed.
2. Single Logical Database
A CDMS must present its users the view of a single, logical, consistent and always available database, no matter how complicated the application.
3. Run Anywhere, Scale Anywhere
A CDMS must be able to run on any infrastructure from single machines to private clouds, public clouds and combinations of the above and must be able to run in a heterogeneous environments.
4. Nonstop Availability
A CDMS must be able to running continuously — for months or years — without failing or being made unavailable for maintenance.
5. Dynamic Multi-tenancy
A CDMS must be dynamically multi-tenant and be able to manage large numbers of databases on a finite set of resources, and to reassign resources to databases as needed.
6. Active/Active Geo-distribution
A CDMS must be able to run concurrently in multiple data centers to support geographically distributed workloads, always-on applications, and for disaster recovery.
7. Embrace Cloud
A CDMS must integrate and run in a cloud environment, and designed to support cloud-scale performance requirements while being resilient against the inherent concurrency and latency challenges.
8. Store Anywhere, Store Redundantly
A CDMS must be able to store the data locally, remotely, in a data center or on a public or private cloud and in whatever storage system is appropriate.
9. Workload Mix
A CDMS must be flexible in the kinds of workloads it supports, and to efficiently run different workloads concurrently.
10. Tunable Durability Guarantees
A CDMS must allow a user to define infrastructure reliability constraints that control the trade off between durability guarantees and database performance.
11. Developer Empowerment
A CDMS must support rapid application development and frictionless application evolution. It should be easy to use without need for time-consuming provisioning requirements.
12. Admin Empowerment
A CDMS should provide a single, secure point of administration for all its databases and resources. It should make it simple to automate logging, auditing, profiling, process management and resource allocation.

Matt Aslett, a research manager for The 451 Group who has spent a good deal of time mapping out the modern database scene, said NuoDB, which promises to bring the strengths of a relational SQL database to highly distributed webscale computing, competes most directly with offerings like GenieDB and in some cases VMware’s SQLFire.

He agreed that NuoDB is making an aggressive statement with its list of rules but that it does so from a credible place. “The NuoDB guys are the real deal. There will be an element of skepticism for any company that claims to do fully-distributed ACID SQL database, but if anyone has the expertise to do this, Jim Starkey is one of those people.”

ACID stands for  “Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability.” Relational databases must offer this capability — which ensures that transactions are performed reliably and accurately. That’s an obvious requirement for modern  e-commerce applications, where every transaction relies on the accuracy of the entire data set.

What will database gurus think of this new list? I’m not sure but would love for them to sound off in comments.

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NuoDB said it got a patent for its “elastically scalable database” from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 15 months — it was filed March 8, 2011 and approved July 17, 2012. That compares with the average patent approval period of 34 months.

NuoDB co-founder and CTO Jim Starkey

“When I started what became NuoDB, the time for variations on existing themes was past,” NuoDB CTO and co-founder Jim Starkey  said in a statement.  ”If databases were to scale, a whole new approach was required, one unsaddled by ancient assumptions.The NuoDB patent represents a clean sheet re-invention of the relational database.  The interface is standard, but the underpinnings are so new that there weren’t even terms for its concepts.  The patent sailed through the patent office with a finding of ‘no prior art.’”

Update: The patent filing is here. According to the abstract, the patent application applies to:

A multi-user, elastic, on-demand, distributed relational database management system. The database is fragmented into distributed objects called atoms. Any change to a copy of an atom at one location is replicated to all other locations containing a copy of that atom. Transactional managers operate to satisfy the properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability.

A patent gives its holder the right to exclude others from using the invention for 20 years from the application date  so in this case NuoDB is protected through 2031.

Starkey is a celebrity in database circles. He was the brains behind Digital Equipment Corp.’s RdB database (now part of Oracle) and Interbase (acquired by Borland) and is responsible for many of the breakthroughs in object databases. His company Netrastructure was acquired by MySQL, the popular open-source database, that is now also owned by Oracle.

His starpower is one reason NuoDB has gotten the attention of database aficionados, attracting backers including Mitchell Kertzman, general partner with Hummer Winblad who was former CEO of Sybase. Kertzman said he’d sworn off databases for the past decade because he found the technology stagnant and uninteresting. NuoDB changed his mind about that. The company more recently snagged Gary Morgenthaler as an investor and board member. Morgethaler was co-founder of Ingres, an early relational database power. He also co-founded Illustra with database superstar Michael Stonebraker, who is now with VoltDB. Those names give NuoDB even more heft.

As Morris explained to me earlier this year, NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, which he finds to be an oversimplification. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris said. He prefers to compare NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up tasks to any number of processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data organized, accessible and safe.

We all know technology patents are tricky business — see GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts’ continuing coverage of the raging patent troll epidemic  — but it does show that NuoDB may be onto something here with its self-scaling elastic database.

Time will tell.

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Gary Morgenthaler, partner at Morgenthaler Ventures.

The database category hasn’t been all that exciting over the past 20 years, with market leaders Oracle, IBM,  Microsoft, Sybase (now SAP trading off incremental updates every year or so. But that period of stasis ended with the advent of cloud computing, open source software and big data — a perfect storm that reinvigorated the field.

Now NuoDB, a new-look database company that seeks to take advantage of that convergence is taking in $10 million in Series B funding, led by Morgenthaler Ventures with additional contributions from existing backers Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. The company also added database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, to its board, joining another database luminary, Hummer Winblad partner Mitchell Kertzman.

Morgenthaler co-founded Ingres, an early relational database software company and co-founded Illustra with Michael Stonebraker a serial database entrepreneur who is now CTO of VoltDb. Illustra was sold to Informix which was in turn bought by IBM for $1 billion.  Morgenthaler has also invested in Siri, Nuance Communications and Nominum. The $10 million cash infusion — which brings total funding to $12 million — will be used to expand the current beta beyond 700 testers and bring the product to market in the fall, according to NuoDB CEO Barry Morris.

In a recent interview, Morgenthaler told me that he’d tracked databases since the sale of Informix in 1986 but really hadn’t seen anything of note. Until now.

“Honestly, I had not found anything sufficiently compelling to get me to re-enter a field I’d had success in. NuoDB is something different in terms of architecture and technology and the potential it represents is a quantum step forward, If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t invest because I want an unblemished record,” he said with a laugh.

SQL, NoSQL, whatever

While NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, Morris quibbles with that characterization. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris told me in a recent interview. He likens NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up the task at hand to any number of processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data organized, accessible and safe.

“Every database from Oracle to DB2 to SQL Server and including MongoDB and Couch has the same core architecture, which is to manage a file on a disk. That means concurrent access to that file is a problem — you cannot scale. For us, the disk is at the edge of the picture and we get away from that central control of everything,” Morris said.

The other analogy Morris likes to use to explain NuoDB’s is the flock of birds flying in formation: “No single bird is the brain, no one bird is in charge,” he said. “Every bird does something simple, but doesn’t even know how many birds are in the flock or where the flock is going. The bird just knows, ‘If the bird on the right flies toward me, I fly a little bit left’. The idea is, you can have lots of simple things collaborating.”

Following that model, NuoDB can distribute that task to any number of processors across geographies as needed, Morris said.

That the Cambridge, Ma.-based startup, one of several hot database companies around Boston,  has been able to draw from the ranks of premier database talent– including Morgenthaler and Kertzman — is a testament to this idea. And to NuoDB’s founder and CTO Jim Starkey, a Digital Equipment Corp. veteran who went on to develop the Interbase database. He is considered a database superstar.

Database allstars

Kertzman, like Morgenthaler, thought he was through with databases when he left Sybase in 1998 and joined Hummer Winblad five years later. “Let’s face it, databases got boring,” he said.

But, Morris was able to sell him on NuoDB.  ”We looked at a lot of new database companies and didn’t invest until Jim and Barry got my attention. Jim is probably one of the top five database scientists [in the world] and this is one category where experience really matters. Not just technical experience but understanding what a SQL online transaction processing [OLTP] database needs to do, ” Kertzman said. “Unless you’ve been in this business you might think a database is a list of features but it’s really demanding. The difference between a pretty good database and one that people will build their business on is pretty big.”

Morgenthaler said NuoDB is just what the era of cloud computing and big data calls for. What is needed, he said, are “massive scale, horizontal scaleout systems that are largely self organizing with modern management tools around them and that have very flexible architectures that allow you to adapt to the application while its running.  [And they need to] run globally distributed in a way that’s flexible to change, change in the size of database needed and the number of nodes running,” he noted, while acknowledging that’s a very tall order.

“Things like Hadoop or Cassandra are great, but developers need choice. We looked at this and said it’s what the market needs.”

Feature photograph courtesy of Flickr user chucka_nc

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Boston has some pretty good database DNA dating back to Digital Equipment Corp.’s venerable Rdb and a raft of small object-oriented database firms that popped up 20 years ago. Those good genes are showing up again in a fresh crop of database companies clustered around the Boston-Cambridge nexus.

The fact that database pioneers Michael Stonebraker (famous for Ingres, Postgres, Streambase and Vertica) is in the area, as is Jim Starkey (instrumental in Rdb, InterBase and Netfrastructure), helps draw database talent from elsewhere and keeps local prospects coming out of MIT or other area schools where they are.

In the traditional, relational database world, the power sphere remains in Silicon Valley, with Oracle, but even that company has been drawn to Boston,  where it beefed up its database portfolio with acquisitions like Endeca. Hewlett-Packard, another valley giant, bought Tewksbury, Mass.-based Vertica and is moving its “big data” operations to Cambridge. Clearly, the area is a center of gravity for a lot of NewSQL, NoSQL and other new-age database startups.

Here are five up-and-coming database companies — most with a “big data” flavor — to watch.

1: Akiban Technologies: This startup’s goal is to speed up database queries by putting data tables into logical groups to make it much faster for users to perform database joins. (Joins are common database operations that combine records from two or more tables.) The basic idea of table-grouping technology, which will work with standard MySQL databases, is to co-locate information that is likely to be involved in common queries together to streamline the process.

Akiban co-founder and CTO Ori Hernndstat uses an online dating site to illustrate. “Say I’m interested in all the people in my area with red hair and a fascination with dogs. When you put that in a relational system, it explodes into many tables — that’s the process of normalization.  You need all users joined with are-they-online-now, joined with regions, joined with hobbies — dogs. That is a four-way join.  [Our] technology … captures all the tables that belong to a given object or profile, and then any queries of those pieces [are] very efficient,” he said. In this example, speed is of the essence. The idea is to see who’s online right this minute that meets all these other criteria.

Hernndstat and co-founder and CEO David McFarlane, formerly with IMLogic and Nexaweb, started the company — then called Akiba Technologies — in July 2009 and at that time  year netted $6.5 million in Series A funding from Northbridge Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. It has 20 employees, all but one in Boston.

2: Paradigm4: Here’s a company that seeks to analyze “highly dimensional” data: satellite data, geospatial data, genomic data — stuff  that tends to display more as an array than as rows and columns.  Paradigm’s CTO is the peripatetic Stonebraker. CEO Marilyn Matz likes to say that Paradigm4 targets “multistructured” data where the key is to be able to look at not just the data itself, but the associated meta-data.

“When you have all this machine-generated or other data, what makes it more interesting is you also have other information about the data. Information about when it was generated, what machine it was produced on, was there a bad data point and did someone go back in and correct it? All that meta-data is valuable, and you want to keep it tied in to the data itself,” she said in an interview.

The result is often matrices and 2-D arrays — data structures that, in Matz’ view, need a better framework for complex analytics. “In operations on matrices and arrays, we’ve proven over time is, if you store all the data natively, the analytics you use will give you high performance,” she said.

Paradigm4, unlike IBM’s Netezza analytics appliance, with which it will compete, is a software-only solution, now in early beta. It will be made available in both free, open-source and commercial versions. The Waltham, Mass.-based company, with 18 employees, is backed by Sigma Partners and Kepha Partners. Matz will talk more about the big data analytics question at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference later this month.

3: Cloudant: Historically, if a cable company or a telco wanted to know what’s going on in its far-flung network — how customers are being serviced, if they’re paying the right amount for what they get — it would collect all that data at the zillions of local endpoints, replicate the data back at a central location and then push it through some analytics.

With Cloudant, a lot of that shlepping goes away, said Derek Schoettle, CEO of the six- three-year-old company. Cloudant lets this customer instead put an instance of Cloudant at the endpoint edge, where it collects and crunches the data and then sends back the processed information rather than the unwieldy original data set.

Schoettle describes the product as a scalable “data layer as a service” built atop the open-source Apache Cloud database, JSON – a common data exchange format — and MapReduce, a popular framework for distributed data.

Cloudant’s data layer can be deployed around the world to collect, store, analyze and distribute applications — to place its processing and aggregation power where it’s needed. The company was founded by three MIT physicists and late last year brought in Schoettle, a former VP at Vertica Systems, as CEO. (Cloudant named Andy Palmer, Stonebraker’s co-founder at Vertica, to its board this week.)

4: Parelastic: How many times have we heard about an e-commerce site brought to its knees by an unexpected spike in demand?  What that usually means is that the relational database powering the site simply can’t scale up to process all those orders. Parelastic wants to crack that problem of database inelasticity while retaining the useful life of existing SQL (specifically MySQL) databases.

Towards that end, the Waltham, Mass., company built middleware that layers atop existing MySQL databases to distribute that workload as it arises. The advantage is that the thousands of people who already have MySQL databases (and skills) can keep using them.

“The problem with SQL systems was that everything went virtual except for the databases. You had all these processors, but everyone kept banging against the same database, which is why people started to abandon SQL for NoSQL. You rebuilt your database atop NoSQL to replicate what you had in SQL, but then you had to find people to deal with databases no one had heard of,” said John Landry, of Lead Dog Ventures, a Parelastic board member and investor. Parelastic seeks to make SQL databases elastic and run in parallel.  ”Hence the name Parelastic,” Landry said.

The company was founded in 2010 by Amrith Kumar, formerly VP of Dataupia, which built the Satori Data Warehousing platform, and Ken Rugg, who was SVP at Progress Software.

5: NuoDB: Barry Morris, founder and CEO of NuoDB said his company has another, NewSQL, take on distributing workloads. It uses peer-to-peer messaging to route tasks to as many nodes as needed to get the job done. “We work almost more like BitTorrent than traditional databases,” he said.

“We use the example of a flock of birds that takes off together, flies at the same time, but there’s no one in charge. It’s peer to peer. Lots of players doing very simple things, but the overall effect is impressive,” he said.

Older SQL databases are great if you can pre-provision your load, he said. They’re not great if there’s an unforeseen spike in a load. If your product is mentioned in The Wall Street Journal and your orders spike 1000-fold, that is the type of workload that is tough for traditional databases to handle. NuoDB’s messaging infrastructure divvies up and provisions loads fast across multiple nodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. NuoDB is in beta now and is slated to ship in a few weeks,  he said.

NuoDB’s co-founder and CTO is Starkey. The company is backed by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, with Mitchell Kertzman, the former CEO of Sybase, taking an active role, as well as Longworth Ventures.

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list of hot database companies in or around Boston. Just a few worth checking out.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user John Stracke

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