According to the mail (and subsequent blog post):

“It is with genuine sadness that we inform you that Xeround’s service will be terminated in the course of the coming weeks, across all of our currently active data centers.”

Xeround’s free and paid service options run on Amazon Web Services; Rackspace, AppFog, Heroku and HP Cloud. The company could not be reached for comment but rivals are circling — ClearDB and Cloudant posted tweets to woo Xeround users.

This news has to be sobering given the number of cloud-based database services dotting the landscape. The company had raised more than $30 million in funding starting in 2005.  Xeround investors include Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.

This story was updated at 4:38 a.m. PST to add the closing date of the paid service, a link to the Xeround blog post, and information on Xeround funding and investors.

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The reunion comes courtesy of a merger between open source database services firm SkySQL (which supports both MySQL and MariaDB deployments for customers ranging from Harvard to Shutterstock) and a company called Monty Program — yes, as in Monty Widenius, who named MySQL after his oldest daughter My and its fork after his younger daughter, Maria.

So now we have Widenius and other ex-MySQLers such as Colin Charles back together with players such as MySQL co-founder David Axmark and former MySQL sales director Magnus Stenberg. Actually, that’s underselling the magnitude of what’s happened here: out of the 70 employees of the fused operation (which is continuing under the SkySQL name), 50 used to be at the original MySQL firm.

Open appeal

At the same time, MariaDB seems to be capitalizing on the disillusionment of some in the open source community with Oracle’s stewardship of MySQL — doing things like releasing extensions for the commercial version but not the free version was never going to win favor in that scene. Wikipedia migrated to MariaDB in the last few days, and the Fedora and OpenSUSE Linux distros will both make the jump in their next releases.

The MariaDB Foundation, which is busy sorting out its governance structure and which now claims SkySQL as an early member, also took on former Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps as its CEO a week ago.

“It is a pleasure to have a company representing the reunited core team of our code base joining the Foundation at its inception,” Phipps said in a statement this week.

MariaDB the “bridge”

The fused team has a unique NewSQL proposition: not only is MariaDB fully compatible with MySQL, but it can also interface with newer NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and LevelDB. According to SkySQL CEO Patrik Sallner, SkySQL will continue to service both MySQL and MariaDB customers and won’t be forcing anyone to jump to MariaDB — but he expects many customers to make that leap nonetheless:

“Right now, because MySQL belongs to Oracle, it’s not necessarily perceived as independent. Linux is the default operating system in most enterprise contexts. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft control the vast majority of business in databases and most companies have at least two of these, which are not compatible with each other. And, as companies deploy new applications, they use new [NoSQL] database technologies to meet their needs.

“We believe that MariaDB has an opportunity to become a truly independent and interoperable open source database, meaning we can provide a solution that’s a neutral ground for companies. … Our aspiration is to start building this into a new form of database platform that ties together other databases in a seamless manner. By providing a bridge, we believe we can create more innovation.”

Sallner noted that there isn’t currently a great deal of difference between MySQL and MariaDB, apart from the latter’s “pluggable” approach to storage engines. “Using the SQL language allows us to be compatible with other databases, and we have a connect engine which allows us to add on-the-fly support for other data formats,” he said.

As a next step, Sallner said he hoped to see other database providers join the MariaDB Foundation, in order to maintain this open common ground. “We’re not competing against DB2 or Oracle or Microsoft today — we’re all serving different needs,” he said. So does he want to sign up Oracle itself? “That’ll be a stretch, but it would be a huge sign of success,” he laughed.

It’s not all bonhomie, though — Sallner reckons large internet companies will engage with MariaDB in a way that they haven’t with Oracle’s MySQL.

“We believe those companies are willing to contribute the work they’ve done back to MariaDB,” he said. “Facebook and Twitter have contributed substantial new features to MariaDB. They probably wouldn’t have contributed that to Oracle.”

UPDATE (10.55am PT): This piece originally and incorrectly stated that Widenius is the new SkySQL CTO, whereas he is in fact the CTO of the MariaDB Foundation. Widenius is on the board of SkySQL, but his role is non-operational.

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That’s why as Hadoop keeps thundering toward its destination as the de facto data platform for next-generation applications, companies such as Cloudera and Hortonworks that are making a killing off it might want to stop and thank the guys from Powerset for building HBase. Because the database — a columnar Google BigTable clone that runs on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System — is so fast and scalable, it’s helping Hadoop find a home in companies and with applications that HDFS and MapReduce alone might not have been able to penetrate so easily.

The latest HBase user I’ve come across is Gravity, the interest graph company that powers content recommendations for some of the biggest publishers on the web.

From big MySQL at MySpace to big data with HBase

Its co-founders were all senior executives at MySpace, including Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto, who was SVP of technology for the social networking pioneer. He was actually MySpace’s first architect and helped build platform’s MySQL database. Although MySpace never reached Facebook’s scale, it did have 150 millions users at its peak, all able to store unlimited numbers of wall posts, messages and photos. Benedetto eventually oversaw a 600-instance cluster that required about 30 database adminstrators to keep it up and running.

Benedetto (center) at Structure: Data 2012. (c) Pinar Ozger

So naturally, when it came time to build out the Gravity architecture, Benedetto opted for the MySQL he knew so well. Until about three years ago, he told me recently, that database held about 95 percent of the company’s data. At some point, though, Benedetto and his team realized they were spending way too much time keeping their MySQL environment up insteading of building new things, so it was time for a change.

It ultimately opted for HBase, but the decision wasn’t easy. “For us,” Benedetto said, “our data and algorithms are our company,” so making the move from a relational database to a column-based database that can serve MapReduce jobs was nerve-racking. After all, he explained, “You never want to migrate your data … and if you have to, you never want to migrate it more than once.” In fact, he added, “you’re not going back.”

But Benedetto says the move to HBase as Gravity’s primary data store has been “life-saving,” and it’s arguably a more important component of the company’s infrastructure than is Hadoop MapReduce. HBase handles the company’s real-time recommendation algorithms, and it does it across the entire Gravity platform rather than on a site-by-site basis. And although it’s not banking-grade when it comes to the consistency of transactions, Benedetto says it’s about 99.95 percent consistent in real time. Later on, batch MapReduce jobs swoop in and pick up whatever HBase dropped earlier, and process it all against the company’s graph algorithms.

An example of an interest graph from Gravity,

Scalable for sure, and getting easier to use

And although it took some serious engineering effort to get HBase operational when Gravity began working with it three years ago, Benedetto thinks HBase is getting to the point (as is rival NoSQL database Cassandra, he acknowledged) where one could safely call it “enterprise-ready.” Right now, he noted, “You’re not gonna to see HBase in a company that just buys Oracle because Oracle is the name and Oracle has been around for 20 years,” but for web startups that hope to reach a certain scale and even for existing companies that are running into the MySQL wall, he sees a shift occurring.

“The web farm is the easiest part of your infrastructure to scale because all it does is cost more money,” Benedetto explained. Databases, on the other hand, require a lot of thinking about how to migrate data, shard the database and otherwise make a piece of software likely designed for a handful of servers, max, spread across dozens or hundreds. HBase really eases the scaling process, as well as the subsequent management, he said. Now, Gravity’s 100-node HBase cluster has only two operations engineers dedicated to it.

Indeed, there are startups trying to capitalize on HBase by using it to power SQL and even MongoDB-compliant databases that can scale beyond what most relational databases can do.

Aside from scale HBase might soon start catching on because of the work companies like Gravity have been doing to make it more user-friendly. It might scale easily, but, as Benedetto noted, it’s not always easy to get started with — especially without some deep understanding of the intricacies of the underlying HDFS infrastructure. Last year, eBay VP of Experience, Search and Platforms Hugh Williams told me that although HBase is one of the big data tools the company is most excited about, it’s also the area where he’d like to see the most improvement.

To help alleviate some of the learning curve, Gravity has developed an open-source tool called HPaste that lets developers access data and run jobs on HBase data using Scala rather than the more-bloated Java programming language on which Hadoop and HBase are built. One of the biggest benefits of HPaste, Benedetto said, is that it lets new HBase developers see the data in a way that makes sense to them: HBase stores everything in byte arrays, he explained, and “when a human tries to read a byte array, it looks like ancient hieroglyphics.”

The Kiji architecture

Elsewhere, a startup called WibiData has created an open-source framework called Kiji that aims to provide a collection of high-level APIs that should make it easier to store different data types in and develop applications on HBase. The company envisions Kiji being to HBase what the Spring Framework has become to Java over the course of the past decade.

Hadoop’s weapon for the mainstream?

But user experience aside, a lot of companies already invested in Hadoop — aside from expert users such as Facebook — are starting to see the promise of HBase and are incorporating it into their architectures.

WibiData co-founder Christophe Bisciglia, who also co-founded Hadoop pioneer Cloudera in 2008, gave me his take on the state of HBase while discussing its role in the future of Hadoop earlier this year. ”If you talk to anyone from Cloudera or any of the platform vendors, I think they will tell you that a large percentage of their customers use HBase. It’s something that I only expect to see increasing,”  he explained. “… HBase is gonna be what takes Hadoop from an ETL and BI platform into a real-time application platform.”

The Cloudera Hadoop stack (Gravity uses Cloudera’s distro).

Benedetto appears to agree. He considers Hadoop as a whole incredibly important, almost on par with what Amazon Web Services did for computing resources, because it lets startups use commercial-grade open source software to do data storage and processing that previously was only available to massive web companies. “More and more … the shining star in that suite is HBase,” he said. “If I were Oracle, I’d be scared.”

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ParElastic sits in between the application and the underlying database and lets developers scale without having to resort to complicated sharding or maybe even moving the database back in-house where they can run it on a bigger server. Architecturally, Founder and CEO Ken Rugg told me, ParElastic’s Database Virtualization Engine is similar to a parallel database system, although it functions more like middleware that manages multiple database instances as one and is designed for operational rather than analytic workloads.

Because it intelligently balances database load and distributed data across servers, ParElastic is ideal for multitenant situations where multiple users, applications or services are accessing the database simultaneously, Rugg added.

Now, anyone familiar with the next-generation database market might think they’ve heard this story before, and they kind of have. The NoSQL database movement rode into town on the promise of high scalability, and the NewSQL movement furthered that story by bringing scale-out performance to SQL. Some of these databases are even available as cloud services.

However, Rugg explained, there’s a big difference between these options and what ParElastic does. Namely, while NoSQL and NewSQL options require deploying an entirely new database and likely rewriting some application code, ParElastic’s software just overlays customers’ existing cloud databases. Rugg said about half of its early users are running standard MySQL versions on Amazon Web Services, while the rest are spread across cloud providers such as Rackspace, Joyent and LiquidWeb.

Some ParElastic users actually manage existing SQL services such as Amazon’s Relational Database Service and Google Cloud SQL. One even uses it to manage an in-house database environment. And technically, Rugg noted, ParElastic could manage cross-cloud database deployments but, because of the inherent latency hit that would entail, “we wouldn’t recommend that.”

However, he said, the biggest beneficiary of ParElastic aside from the company itself might well be AWS. It is by far the most widely used cloud in the world, but when users reach the limites of their single database instances, Amazon usually tells them to look into sharding or perhaps transitioning to DynamoDB. “None of those are really too friendly for Amazon keeping their customers moving forward in their cloud,” Rugg said.

Further, although certain cloud providers offer better CPU, IO or network performance than AWS does (Rugg cited Rackspace as being particularly strong on IO performance, for example, and ProfitBricks as looking promising on the network front), “Amazon is sort of the lowest common denominator in a number of ways,” Rugg explained. The economics and performance requirements vary from application to application, of course, but ParElastic could help stitch together a number of commodity AWS instances to provide suitable performance at a lower cost than might be possible using the biggest, fastest instances from other providers.

Having watched the cloud market unfold as it has, though, Rugg and ParElastic aren’t banking on AWS — which has a reputation for launching services that compete with startup ecosystem partners — as the future of the business. By supporting other cloud providers that are gaining acceptance (aside from the ones Rugg noted, Google has been impressing some with the performance of its Compute Engine service), ParElastic is in a pretty good position to handle whatever cloud-database market shifts might occur.

“Even if Amazon comes out and says ‘We’re going to replace you with something we built back in the lab,’ that puts us in a great position in terms of validating the market,” Rugg said.

ParElastic’s existing investors — Point Judith Capital,  CommonAngels and LaunchCapital — also participated in the Series A round, which brings the company’s total venture capital to $8.7 million.

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Although, of all LinkBench’s features — and you can read all about them in a Facebook Engineer wall post from Monday morning — probably the biggest is that it’s open source and built to be extensible. One of the biggest problems with benchmarks overall is that they rarely align with actual production workloads inside the companies that are supposed to care about them. In this case, for example, a benchmark for measuring the performance of Facebook’s massive MySQL+memcached+Flashcache database architecture against its massive social graph and transaction activity would be all but worthless unless someone was just planning to rebuild Facebook.

I’ve written in the past that perhaps crowdsourced benchmarks are the wave of the future: essentially a compiled set of statistics and best practices as more companies test different database (or Hadoop) technologies on different hardware setups against different workloads and publish the results. Everything will of course vary by the exact details within any given environment, but it would be a good way to get a sense of how a particular stack might, or perhaps should, fare.

But an open source benchmark tuned for a specific use case — social graphs — by probably the world’s foremost expert on that use case is interesting, too. Anyone else trying to serve data from their own social graphs can benefit from some of LinkBench’s more-prominent features, such as its ability to generate “large synthetic social graphs,” while tuning it to the specifics of their own infrastructure. After all, it might be that your app has different requirement around reading versus writing data, and it’s very possible you’re not using MySQL, either.

Or maybe you are using MySQL and want to see how a newer database technology might handle your graph workload. That, by the way, is one of the reasons Facebook built LinkBench, according to this post.

At any rate, the social web is all about graphs, and database performance really matters for anyone trying to build a service that stays online and provides a pleasant user experience. Say what you want about Facebook, but its services perform, so the bar is set high for anyone trying to dethrone it or at least to build something than can attract an equally large and devout following.

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Chris Lalonde, co-founder CEO of ObjectRocket

The deal, the terms were not disclosed, shows that major cloud infrastructure providers need to offer an array of database options — Rackspace already offers MySQL but Amazon Web Services offers a full slate of databases and managed databases. In December, Softlayer launched hosted MongoDB as a service it developed with 10gen.

“Mongo is breaking away from the pack and our customers are asking for it,” said Pat Matthews, SVP of corporate development for Rackspace, San Antonio, Texas. He said the company could have built its own version of the open-source database or partnered with a MongoDB provider — but was impressed with the expertise of the ObjectRocket co-founders Chris Lalonde, Erik Beebe and Kenny Gorman who between them spent years at Ebay, Paypal, Shutterfly and AOL.

ObjectRocket characterizes its offering as MongoDB as a service, meaning that users don’t have to sweat a lot of the set-up nitty gritty. It competes with rivals like MongoHQ and MongoLab.

“The primary difference between us and other database-as-a-service companies is we built out our cloud rather than layer on top of general platforms,” Lalonde said in an interview. “We built a cloud platform from the ground up specifically for MongoDB, we went to Equinix and did our own hardware platform and tuned the OS and the rest of the stack for Mongo in a way that enables us to get great performance and also have a more highly available system.”

Of course that means integrating it into the Rackspace platform will take time, which is fine with Rackspace, according to Matthews. “The offering as it stands will exist for a while till we can figure out the best ways to integrate it. We will maintain or improve performance and we won’t rush to integrate it at the expense of what we have now.”

Critics could argue that Rackspace is late to this party given the database options Amazon Web Services has, but then again, we’re still pretty early in the cloud deployment game.

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Folks who think companies should keep applications running on premises will doubtless point to these snafus as proof that running cloud services is a fools errand. But how many people running on-premises e-mail have not had similar issues? Speaking as someone who used to rely both on Lotus Notes and then Exchange Server run by my employers, I can attest that outages happen much more than companies admit. The big difference is those internal email meltdowns don’t get covered by every tech news outlet on the planet.

Now, here’s more cloud news from the week

Amazon’s cloud business grows and grows

Somewhat lost amid the news about Wall Street blithely dismissing Amazon.com’s(a amzn) missed earnings targets was this gem: Revenue from Amazon Web Services (or at least the category of which AWS is a part) rose 68 percent year over year for Amazon’s foutyh quarter. Revenue from the category hit $769 million, up from $459 million for the year-ago period. As for profitability? That’s anyone’s guess.

Microsoft adds another data analysis option

Microsoft added – SiSense and its Prism data analytics prowess — to the big data analytics options available on its Azure platform-as-a-Service. Prism can run on-premises or in the cloud offering customers mix-and-match deployment options, according to CRN. Prism offers automatic ETL (data extraction, transform, load) capabilities from SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, QuickBase databases and Salesforce.com, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, Zendesk and QuickBooks applications as well as Hadoop and Hive, according to a SiSense statement.

This news came days after Microsoft announced an expansion of its Windows Azure Store which is now available in 11 markets worldwide. Microsoft corporate VP Scott Guthrie announced the news along with new services available from the store, in a blog post.

Tier 3 names Schiltz CEO and president

Tier 3 CEO Matthew Schiltz

Cloud services startup Tier 3 named Matthew Schiltz as its new president and CEO. Schiltz was previously CEO of Symform and before that of DocuSign and CourtLink. That means that Jared Wray, founder and CTO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Tier 3 who had been acting CEO, can get back to the CTO and chief architect roles he relishes.

“Matt was our top CEO target. He brings the key strategic and operational leadership needed to guide Tier 3 as we deliver the most complete enterprise cloud management platform available” Wray said in a statement.

Other cloud news from around the web

Here are some of the stories from other news outlets:

• Analyst Louis Columbus wraps up the latest cloud forecasts and estimates in Forbes.
• The Fedora open source project now backs MariaDB database rather than MySQL as its database of choice, according to ZDnet.
• Rackspace certified three reference architectures designed to accelerate deployment of its OpenStack-based private cloud in enterprise accounts, according to Data Center Knowledge.

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The blog, written by Githubber Jesse Newland, provides a detailed post mortem of the events leading up to the snafu, but here’s the gist:

… three primary events contributed to the downtime of the past few days. First, several failovers of the ‘active’ database role happened when they shouldn’t have. Second, a cluster partition occurred that resulted in incorrect actions being performed by our cluster management software. Finally, the failovers triggered by these first two events impacted performance and availability more than they should have.

A complicating factor was that Github’s status site, which runs independently on Heroku, experienced availability issues on Tuesday when traffic spiked. Github worked with Heroku to add a production database to handle the load and then a database slave to safeguard against similar occurrences.

Github’s distributed nature means that an outage at the mothership doesn’t mean all works grinds to a halt. “You can’t pull or push, but you can still make commits and branch to your local repository, then push when it comes back online,” said one GigaOM commenter. “That’s the whole key behind a [distributed version control system.]. And even if you need to share files … you can create .patch files and send them through other means.”

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The stated goal of this move is to let other groups —  state, local or foreign governments or non governmental organizations (NGOs)  –  use the same code, adjusted for their constituencies. The application uses Drupal, the open source content management system, MySQL, MongoDB and PHP, and the code is covered under the GNU General Public License.

Several government agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, NASA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the General Services Administration, also use GitHub as a code repository for  various projects, according to the publication FedScoop.

The Obama Administration launched the We The People portal last September as a way for citizens to register their own views and find or launch petitions. A quick review of the site shows petitions asking the administration to implement no-fly zone over Syria (231 signatures) and to  release the recipe for the White House’s home-brewed honey ale (4,167 signatures.)

The release of the source code is part of the administration’s bigger plan to push big data and “open data” as a way to streamline and cut costs.

To see how the application works, check out the video.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Tom Lohdan

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