Databases

Twitter now indexes every tweet ever

Twitter has built a new search index that allows users to surface all public tweets since the service launched in 2006. At nearly half a trillion documents and a scale of 100 times Twitter’s standard real-time index, it’s an impressive feat of engineering.

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Amazon expands its NoSQL story with JSON support in DynamoDB

Amazon Web Services’ popular DynamoDB service now supports JSON documents, a capability that makes it more competitive against alternatives from Microsoft, Google and MongoDB. AWS also increased storage and throughput limits on the DynamoDB free tier, making the service that much more appealing.

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Introducing Chaos to Cassandra

http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/10/introducing-chaos-to-c.html Cloud developers and engineers have probably heard about Netflix’s (s nflx)Chaos Monkey before, and now the company has turned the tool…

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Six degrees of separation, NSA-style

Whether it’s ethically right or wrong to investigate deep into suspects’ networks of connections, the NSA certainly has the processing power to do it. “Three hops” away isn’t much when you can map potentially trillions of identities.

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Report

Second-quarter IT spending: analysis and outlook

We’re close to the second half of 2013, and the news (besides the stock market) has been largely disappointing for traditional IT spending. We’re still looking for an inflection point that will invigorate overall spending, but the news is spotty with some fundamental drags that are likely to impede moving the meter much this year. Like 2012, 2013 looks like another transitional year to the next wave of IT value that we won’t be seeing in earnest until 2014 at the earliest.

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Now anyone can buy the NSA’s database tech

Sqrrl Enterprise, a commercial version of the National Security Agency’s Accumulo database technology, is now generally available. As one might expect, it’s all about security and analytics at a massive scale.

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Look, IBM is doing SQL on Hadoop, too

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.

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Facebook’s long Graph Search to-do list

Hundreds of thousands of users already use Facebook’s Graph Search tool, a product manager said at a briefing for reporters Thursday. But a lot of challenges are ahead as the company develops the product further.

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With another $12M, ScaleArc wants to keep your database relevant

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.

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Graph startup Neo raises $11M as specialized databases take hold

Graph database startup Neo Technology has raised another $11 million, providing more fuel to the fire of specialized databases. Whether they’re graph databases organizing data by relationships, or geospatial databases concerned with where stuff is located, everyone is trying capitalize on myriad new data sources available.

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RainStor raises $12M to make your big data small

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.

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ParStream raises $5.6M for high-speed analytics

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.

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NoSQL startup Basho raises $11.1M and storms Japan

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.

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To SQL or to NoSQL: the database dilemma

Everybody likes a good technology debate: Mac vs. PC, Android vs. iOS, Larry Ellison vs. the world. On Thursday panelists at GigaOM Structure turned their attention to the world of databases: SQL or NoSQL?

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Big data: The quick and the dead

The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon. But before we start saving every scrap of data in the enterprise for fear that we will miss a nugget of insight, shouldn’t we focus on what we already have?

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Metamarkets, DataPop and more! Investors show big data some love

If you don’t think venture capitalists and other investors love all things big data, think again. In the past three days alone, companies claiming some connection to big data — either analyzing and/or storing large volumes of data — have announced at least $56 million in new funding.

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How the AP got a hold of its big, old data

Holding onto millions of pieces of archived content it still wanted to monetize, the Associated Press turned to MarkLogic’s NoSQL non-relational database designed for XML files. As publishers try to leverage their years worth of archived, often not tagged content, they’ll need new tools.

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Why Klout is making its bed with Hadoop and … Microsoft

Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL Server.

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SpaceCurve scores $2.7M to analyze location data

SpaceCurve, a startup pushing a database designed for location data, has raised $2.7 million on the promise it can help developers better leverage the Internet of things. SpaceCurve is designed for apps that need to analyze lots of complex location data in a hurry.

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Datafiniti builds a webscale search engine for data

There’s a lot of talk about the democratization of data, but simply making data sets publicly available leaves open some key problems. Datafiniti wants to change that with a search engine it hopes will make finding structured data as easy as finding sites using Google.

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Orbitz outsources analytics to the cloud

Travel-booking service Orbitz chose Kognitio’s Data Warehouse as a Service offering. The decision to move such a critical piece of the analytics stack to Kognitio’s cloud service highlights Orbitz’s commitment big data and is further proof that the cloud is an ideal place for it.

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Is Hadoop just the flavor of the day?

Hadoop is becoming a popular choice for large organizations needing to store and process large volumes of unstructured data, but is it merely the flavor of the day? An eBay exec recently questioned his continued use of the platform if the pace of development doesn’t improve.

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Oracle docs show plans for Hadoop, NoSQL

It looks as if Oracle’s official forays into Hadoop and NoSQL spaces will come at next week’s OpenWorld conference. The company appears to be working on an Oracle Loader for Hadoop and a NoSQL database as part of an all-encompassing big data platform.

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Neo raises $10.6M for Neo4j as graph DBs take off

Graph databases are a pretty specialized product — but as NoSQL keeps gaining mainstream acceptance, they seem to be catching on, and the latest evidence comes in the form of a $10.6 million funding found for Silicon Valley firm Neo Technology.

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HP’s reported $10B bet on big data

Bloomberg is reporting that HP plans to announce a $10 billion deal to buy Autonomy, a U.K. based software company that has bought up a variety of assets over the years to create an unstructured data storage and analyzing powerhouse.

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Cloud databases face challenges but opportunities beckon

Cloud databases present their own challenges but opportunities abound for companies pushing the edge. That’s the word from a collection of cloud database executives who shared their views at the GigaOM Structure conference on the future of cloud databases.

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Red Hat Does Database for Cloud Computing Platforms

Red Hat is expanding its set of cloud capabilities by announcing the JBoss Enterprise Data Grid. The product gives customers an in-memory data grid that scales along with the server infrastructure and provides a high-performance cache to offload the demand on the primary database.

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Couchbase Adapts Big Data for Mobile Devices

NoSQL startup Couchbase is offering a beta version of its Mobile Couchbase for iOS product, which is designed for iPhone app developers who want data synchronization between mobile devices and backend data stores. The product targets data like preferences, contacts, game scores and enterprise application data.

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Google’s Angels, Others Back IO Turbine

The angels who wrote the first check to Google were also the first backers of startup IO Turbine, which comes out of stealth mode today with details about its fundraising, its founders and its planned product for speeding up I/O bottlenecks on virtualized servers.

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With a New CEO, MarkLogic Eyes Big Data IPO

Unstructured database provider MarkLogic has a new CEO with big-business experience and plans to take fast-growing company public. MarkLogic is nowhere near the size of CEO Ken Bado’s former employer, Autodesk, but it does have a healthy business that belies its relative youth and NoSQL ties.

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NoSQL Startup Citrusleaf Launches, Promising the Moon

The NoSQL database space is little more crowded this morning, as Citrusleaf officially launched with its eponymous product, which promises users the best of both the relational and NoSQL worlds. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced a reported $2 million initial round of funding.

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Ravel Hopes to Open-Source Graph Databases

Ravel wants to provide a supported open source version of Google’s Pregel software called Golden Orb to handle large-scale graph analytics. Ravel COO Zach Richardson told me in the following video interview that the startup would release the Golden Orb code on March 31st.

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Making Hadoop Work in More Places With Hadapt

A Yale computer science project has turned into a company giving Hadoop the ability to perform analytics on both structured and unstructured data. Hadapt launched today with an undisclosed amount of funding and the goal of making Hadoop more broadly applicable for analytics.

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For Xeround, MySQL in the Cloud Knows No Bounds

Cloud database provider Xeround has made its MySQL database available as as add-on within Heroku’s PaaS offering, following on its availability for Amazon EC2 users in September and likely preceding availability on a number of other cloud computing platforms.

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Everyone’s Welcome in the NoSQL Commune — For Now

NoSQL has been able to withstand the trappings of its newfound popularity and maintain a communal spirit, an observation proved once again by the NoSQL Tapes. But how long until they become like many open-source movements, united under the same banner but jockeying for position?

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Are Outdated Data Architectures Holding Back the Cloud?

Cloud computing represents a fundamental technical and business trend, but there are barriers in cloud computing that limit broad cloud-based deployment of scaled enterprise-class services. Hybrid clouds will overcome some of these barriers, but the future requires improvements in cloud architectures and virtualization technologies.

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Is the End Nigh for Database Appliances?

If the tale of Schooner Information Technology is any indication, the answer to the titular question is “no.” Today, Schooner, which just under two years ago launched its its high-powered, flash-based database appliance made a hard left turn to selling software only.

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Clustrix Lifts the Curtain on Early Database Customers

Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer.

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Handicapping Big Data Tools — Which Ones Will Thrive?

Rather than bombard readers with information with the holidays officially upon us, I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Which of the following big data approaches and startups will thrive, which will remain relegated to specific use cases, and which will simply fade into oblivion?

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Nov. 16: What We’re Reading About the Cloud

Today, we have either-or questions, like whether cloud computing kill virtualization, or if NoSQL replace SQL in the cloud. But the news proves the answers lie in the gray area, such as Facebook choosing HBase, AWS getting ISO certification, and another complement to the CPU.

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How the Cloud is Changing the Way DB Administrators Work

Though it’s tempting to assume the proliferation of cloud computing dramatically changes the way database administrators work, that may not actually be the case. obin Schumacher, director of product strategy at EnterpriseDB, takes a look at what the cloud means for today’s database administrators.

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Will Scalable Data Stores Make NoSQL a Non-Starter?

The discussion around NoSQL seems to have evolved from abolishing SQL databases to coexisting with SQL databases, and then to SQL is actually regaining momentum. Is SQL regaining favor, even among webscale types? Was it ever out of favor?

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What Comes Next in the Red-Hot Analytics Market?

The action in the data warehouse/analytic database space has been hot and heavy over the past couple weeks, with new funding, acquisitions and partnerships announced seemingly every day, and this trend is unlikely to slow. I predict a few more acquisitions coming down the pike.

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Is Cloudera Allying Its Way to an Acquisition?

Big Data has been at the forefront of many vendors’ agendas lately. Perhaps no one has been leading the charge as vocally as Cloudera, but the question now is when Cloudera’s stewardship and alliances will result in it getting snatched up by a large vendor.

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Filemaker Go 1.1 Adds Barcode Scanning and More

Both the iPhone and the iPad versions of Filemaker Go were updated to 1.1 today. The update adds some nice features, including barcode scanning, thanks to third party integration with other apps. It’s a sign of exciting new things to come from the app for businesses.

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Quick Look: Bento 3

The whirlwind development of FileMaker’s consumer database software continues with the release of Bento 3. Bento 3 adds several new features, including…

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Sequel Pro 0.96 Released

The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the…

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MapReduce vs. SQL: It's Not One or the Other

A study released today by a team of leading database experts, among them Structure 09 speaker Michael Stonebraker, has been generating buzz…

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First Look: Filemaker Pro 10

The venerable Mac database solution, Filemaker Pro, has received a whole new look for 2009. I have had a chance to kick…

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Bento goes 1.0

Back in November, FileMaker released a preview of their soon-to-be-released personal database app, Bento. Yesterday they officially released the gold version of…

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