The Data Day, A few days: July 18-23 2013

DataStax raises $45m. Actian’s post-acquisition binge strategy. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: July 11-17 2013

FoundationDB acquires Akiban. Cloudera acquihires Myrrix. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: March 25-28 2013

Google pledges patent support for OSS. Basho open sources Riak CS. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, Two days: December 4/5 2012

EMC/VMware make Pivotal move. Funding for ClearStory. And more

And that’s the Data Day, today.

The Data Day, Two days: August 13/14 2012

Datomic calls time on RDBMS. Actian offers $154m for Pervasive. And more

And that’s the Data Day, today.

The Data Day, Today: July 19 2012

Clustrix teams with Rackspace. Jaspersoft enables interactive reporting. And more.

And that’s the Data Day, today.

The Data Day, Today: Feb 17 2012

Rob Bearden is new Hortonworks CEO. Oracle updates MySQL Cluster. And more.

An occasional series of data-related news, views and links posts on Too Much Information. You can also follow the series @thedataday.

* With a new CEO, will Hortonworks get serious about Hadoop? Rob Bearden is Hortonworks’ new chief elephant-herder.

* Oracle Oracle Announces General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.2. Claims 1 billion queries per minute.

* Vertica Extends Manageability and Ease-of-Use for the Vertica Analytics Platform.

* NGDATA Raises Capital to Accelerate Growth Belgian data management company confirms that it recently acquired Outerthought.

* QlikTech Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2011 Financial Results

* Quest Business Intelligence Studio 1.0 is now Generally Available

* Jaspersoft Delivers Big Data Integration into Jaspersoft ETL

* Hortonworks University Launches to Deliver Comprehensive Apache Hadoop Training and Certification.

* Schema in Cassandra 1.1. “as systems deployed on Cassandra grew and matured, lack of schema became a pain point”

* GigaSpaces Announces New Cloudify Free Product Edition.

* Announcing Reduced Pricing on SQL Azure and New 100MB Database Option.

* Composite Software Continues Innovation with Release of Version 6.1 of its Data Virtualization Platform.

* Multi-Tenant Cloudant in Europe.

* NuvolaBase has launched its hosted graph database offering.

* How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Big data’s beer and diapers equivalent.

* Beyond “Big Data”. “I have a theory that buzzwords are usually helpful in general, in that they usher in new concepts before they end up as meaningless marketing fluff–and, eventually, punchlines. I think this is in the process of happening right now with the term “big data”.”

* For 451 Research clients

# Akiban prepares to launch ‘table grouping’ NewSQL database IMpact Report

# IBM sheds light on the Big Blue business of information governance Market Decelopment Report

And that’s the Data Day, today.

What we talk about when we talk about NewSQL

Yesterday The 451 Group published a report asking “How will the database incumbents respond to NoSQL and NewSQL?”

That prompted the pertinent question, “What do you mean by ‘NewSQL’?”

Since we are about to publish a report describing our view of the emerging database landscape, including NoSQL, NewSQL and beyond (now available), it probably is a good time to define what we mean by NewSQL (I haven’t mentioned the various NoSQL projects in this post, but they are covered extensively in the report. More on them another day).

“NewSQL” is our shorthand for the various new scalable/high performance SQL database vendors. We have previously referred to these products as ‘ScalableSQL’ to differentiate them from the incumbent relational database products. Since this implies horizontal scalability, which is not necessarily a feature of all the products, we adopted the term ‘NewSQL’ in the new report.

And to clarify, like NoSQL, NewSQL is not to be taken too literally: the new thing about the NewSQL vendors is the vendor, not the SQL.

So who would be consider to be the NewSQL vendors? Like NoSQL, NewSQL is used to describe a loosely-affiliated group of companies (ScaleBase has done a good job of identifying, some of the several NewSQL sub-types) but what they have in common is the development of new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.

In the first group we would include (in no particular order) Clustrix, GenieDB, ScalArc, Schooner, VoltDB, RethinkDB, ScaleDB, Akiban, CodeFutures, ScaleBase, Translattice, and NimbusDB, as well as Drizzle, MySQL Cluster with NDB, and MySQL with HandlerSocket. The latter group includes Tokutek and JustOne DB. The associated “NewSQL-as-a-service” category includes Amazon Relational Database Service, Microsoft SQL Azure, Xeround, Database.com and FathomDB.

(Links provide access to 451 Group coverage for clients. Non-clients can also apply for trial access).

Clearly there is the potential for overlap with NoSQL. It remains to be seen whether RethinkDB will be delivered as a NoSQL key value store for memcached or a “NewSQL” storage engine for MySQL, for example. While at least one of the vendors listed above is planning to enable the use of its database as a schema-less store, we also expect to see support for SQL queries added to some NoSQL databases. We are also sure that Citrusleaf won’t be the last NoSQL vendor to claim support for ACID transactions.

NewSQL is not about attempting to re-define the database market using our own term, but it is useful to broadly categorize the various emerging database products at this particular point in time.

Another clarification: ReadWriteWeb has picked up on this post and reported on the “NewSQL Movement”. I don’t think there is a movement in that sense that we saw the various NoSQL projects/vendors come together under the NoSQL umbrella with a common purpose. Perhaps the NewSQL players will do so (VoltDB and NimbusDB have reacted positively to the term, and Tokutek has become the first that I am aware of to explicitly describe its technology as NewSQL). As Derek Stainer notes, however: ” In the end it’s just a name, a way to categorize a group of similar solutions.”

In the meantime, we have already noted the beginning for the end of NoSQL, and the lines are blurring to the point where we expect the terms NoSQL and NewSQL will become irrelevant as the focus turns to specific use cases.

The identification of specific adoption drivers and use cases is the focus of our forthcoming long-form report on NoSQL, NewSQL and beyond, from which the 451 Group reported cited above is excerpted.

The report contains an overview of the roots of NoSQL and profiles of the major NoSQL projects and vendors, as well as analysis of the drivers behind the development and adoption of NoSQL and NewSQL databases, the evolving role of data grid technologies, and associated use cases.

It will be available very soon from the Information Management and CAOS practices and we will also publish more details of the key drivers as we see them and our view of the current database landscape here.