Deep inside the House of Mouse researchers are solving computer science and mechanical engineering problems — like how to build a robot that can hand you a drink without creeping you out. Read more »
Database startup Drawn to Scale, creator of the SQL-on-Hadoop technology called Spire, is closing down. The company’s product, Spire, was one of the first SQL-on-Hadoop technologies. Read more »
Teradata is trying to steal some thunder in the in-memory analytics space with a new technology called Intelligent Memory that places hot data in RAM while dispersing the rest across solid-state drives and disk. Read more »
MetLife is building new products on new technologies thanks to a $300 million investment in new technology and new skills. One of the first products is a MongoDB-based app that puts all of customers’ information in one place. Read more »
IBM’s entrant in the SQL-on-Hadoop competition has been flying under the radar, but is available as a technology preview. Called Big SQL, it’s a big deal if IBM wants to be a major player in the Hadoop space. Read more »
The Wikimedia Foundation’s first major new project in 7 years is now feeding the biggest project in that stable, Wikipedia itself. But anyone can take structured data from Wikidata, due to its open license. Read more »
MySQL and MariaDB services company SkySQL has brought Monty Widenius and other MariaDB players on board. The result, says CEO Patrik Sallner, will be “a new form of database platform that ties together other databases.” Read more »
Having realized that 10 percent of its customer base is in the EMEA region, DataStax has launched a subsidiary there to further push its bundle of Hadoop, Cassandra and Solr. Read more »
Database startup Drawn to Scale has extended its Spire distributed data platform from SQL to MongoDB. That means users can get high performance from the latter even across hundreds of terabytes. Read more »
In Part III of our look at all things Hadoop, we examine the trends driving Hadoop’s future. At the end of the day, everything is pushing Hadoop toward being just generally faster and easier to consume. Read more »
Facebook has developed a new data cache called McDipper that’s essentially memcached rewritten to run on flash memory instead of DRAM, thus saving money while still delivering higher performance than disk. Read more »
Five years ago, LinkedIn was a shell of the technology company it is today. Here’s an inside look at where it came from, what it’s become and where it’s going. Read more »
EMC Greenplum rolled out a new Hadoop distribution that fuses the popular big data platform with its flagship MPP database technology. Co-founder Scott Yara thinks the company’s huge investment puts it in the catbird seat among Hadoop vendors. Read more »
More and more companies and open source projects are trying to let users run SQL queries from inside Hadoop itself. Here’s a list of what’s available and, on a high level, how they work. Read more »
Citus Data has expanded its high-speed, analytic database called CitusDB beyond Postgres and into Hadoop. Up next, MongoDB and just about anything else you can think of. Read more »
Zynga has deployed nearly 100 nodes of MemSQL, the hot new database from two former Facebook engineers. It might not be a magic pill for Zynga’s woes, but it could help the company boost revenue and even build new types of games. Read more »
SAP’s customers, used to running its enterprise software on the likes of Oracle, now have an in-house in-memory alternative. It’s a bid for relevance on SAP’s part and, according to chairman Hasso Plattner, mobile is the big driver. Read more »
ScaleArc’s technology sits between applications and their SQL databases, claiming to provide better performance and better operational insights than running MySQL, Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL Server alone. With a $12.3 million Series C round, ScaleArc will try to withstand a glut of competition. Read more »
Confused by the glut of new NoSQL, NewSQL, post-SQL, structured, unstructured database options that came out over the past year? 451 Research’s Matthew Aslett maps it all out for you. Read more »
Despite a grim economy, the tech sector is booming. For entrepreneurial people, there are lots of ways to get a foot in the door, even in a completely new field. This is how Brendan O’Brien, of Aria Systems, did it. Read more »
Metamarkets is open sourcing its in-memory database technology called Druid. The rationale for open sourcing a key piece of its technology platform is both altruistic (better all!) and a savvy recognition that if the startup doesn’t do it, someone else will build it. Read more »
IBM and Cisco have both launched specialized hardware designed to securely and efficiently handle big data, but is there a large market for specialized big data gear? If there is such a market, are these the boxes that will fill it? Read more »
FedEx has always dealt in big data, but its CIO Rob Carter isn’t worried about more. In a conversation with reporters he explained how FedEx has coped in the past and where he things the future of data storage is heading. Read more »
Big data company RainStor has raised $12 million is Series C funding for its database that’s designed to shrink data footprints by at least 95 percent. It also plays nice with Hadoop, meaning a system can handle ad hoc SQL queries as well as MapReduce jobs. Read more »
Oracle’s promised new public and private clouds will run (spoiler alert) Oracle OS, Oracle VM, Oracle database and new Oracle Exadata X3 hardware. The company’s scale-up approach flies in the face of scale-out clouds espoused by market leaders like Amazon. Read more »
Pinterest has learned about scaling the way most popular sites do — the architecture works until one day it doesn’t. But in a talk at the Surge Conference two Pinterest engineers shared their wars stories. Here’s what they learned about keeping it simple and database sharding. Read more »
Orbitz has transitioned a major system off of Oracle’s Coherence database and onto the NoSQL Couchbase Server, but the database giant still has a significant footprint in Orbitz’s data centers. It’s all part of being a big company trying to roll with the IT punches. Read more »
MongoDB proprietor 10gen has raised more money, this time an undisclosed sum from intelligence-agency strategic investor In-Q-Tel. 10gen is the firm’s first foray into NoSQL databases, although certainly not its only investment in the next-generation data-management space that also includes big data technologies like Hadoop. Read more »
Hosted memcached provider MemCachier is expanding like crazy, moving from its homebase on Heroku into the AppFog, CloudBees, DotCloud and Amazon EC2 platforms. It’s impressive growth for a bootstrapped company that launched in April and was little more than an idea a year ago. Read more »
Google designed BigQuery as a cloud service for running fast queries against massive datasets, but with lofty ambitions there’s always room to take a step back. Now, users that don’t require super speed can run batch queries, and can connect to the service using Microsoft Excel. Read more »
Although it’s still a work in progress, 0xdata thinks it has the answer to the problem of doing advanced statistical analysis at scale: Build on HDFS for scale, use the widely known R programming language and hide it all under a simple interface. Read more »
German startup ParStream raised a $5.6 million Series A round for its analytic database that goes head to head with larger vendors such as HP Vertica, EMC Greenplum and ParAccel. It’s a highly competitive database market right now, so we’ll see if ParStream has legs. Read more »
NuoDB, the Cambridge, Mass.-based database startup, is drawing lots of interest and blue-chip investors with a ton of database cred. Now it also has a patent that gives credence to its claims that its elastic database is truly innovative. Read more »
Drawn to Scale’s Spire database is meant to be all things to all people — it combines Hadoop, HBase and SQL to provide a fast, scalable, robust experience — and now it has integrated with MapR’s Hadoop distribution. It’s no surprise the young company already claims big customers. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
Heroku built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the PostreSQL database. Called Postgres.app, the product should be available in the App Store soon and includes a number of popular Postgres features and libraries. Read more »
Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak NoSQL database and the Riak CS cloud storage platform, has raised $11.1 million and has entered into a partnership with data center provider IDC Frontier to distribute its technology throughout Japan. Read more »
NuoDB has $10 million in Series B funding led by Morgenthaler Ventures and adds database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler to its board. The company will use the funding to widen the beta of its webscale database and get it out broadly this fall. Read more »
Software as a service is a great for deploying applications across a company. The flip side is that it ends up creating data silos across vendors. Roger Sippl’s Cloud Connection aims to bridge those silos so users can use their data as they see fit. Read more »
Startup Prior Knowledge opened up its public beta to its database API on Monday, so it can solve the problems of developers who want to play with data, but who’d rather avoid all that pesky math. Prior Knowledge has raised $1.4 million to achieve its goals. Read more »
