Ten Top Tech Trends to Watch in 2014
In-memory database technologies are emerging as a hot new category, as evidenced today by the raising of an additional $35 million in funding by MemSQL.
Founded by former Facebook engineers, MemSQL is designed to give organizations access to real-time analytics using standard SQL.
MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel says rather than requiring IT organizations to acquire massively parallel databases that are optimized for specific appliances, MemSQL is designed to run on any set of industry standard x86 servers that support Linux. That approach makes in-memory computing both affordable and scalable, using a scale-out architecture that allows IT organizations to increase the size of the database grid gradually over time by adding additional x86 servers, says Frenkiel.
Most recently, MemSQL added support for the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) data format that is being increasingly used in mobile computing applications. Frenkiel says support for JSON means that MemSQL is optimized to support applications that need to analyze JSON data being generated by mobile computing applications.
Rather than relying on batch-oriented data warehouses where data has historically gone to die, Frenkiel says organizations are clearly interested in applying real-time analytics. The issue they have is that they don’t want to have to invest in expensive proprietary appliances or abandon their investments in standard SQL to accomplish that goal.
In-memory computing is clearly one of the next big things to come to the enterprise. Thanks to the rise of more powerful x86 servers, the good news is that it’s no longer going to be the sole domain of a few hundred organizations that could afford to throw millions of dollars at specialized in-memory appliance technologies.
