Splunk goes public. SkySQL and Connotate raise funding. And more.

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

* Splunk Prices Initial Public Offering 13,500,000 shares at $17.00 per share = $229.5m.

* Connotate Increases Momentum and Closes $7m Series B Round

* SkySQL Raises $4 million in Series A Round

* SAND Technology Announces Exploration of Potential Strategic Alternatives

* GoodData Closes out the Quarter With Increased Revenue Growth and Expanded Market Traction

* World’s Largest Telcos Adopt Graph Databases to Solve Connected Data Issues

* Gazzang Seizes Big Data Opportunity, Announces Record Quarter and Year over Year Growth

* Hadapt Adds Big Data Industry Veteran Christopher Lynch as Chairman of the Board of Directors

* PalominoDB and SkySQL Join Forces to Offer Unparalleled Remote Database Services to Leading Companies Worldwide

* Cloudant Data Layer as a Service Adds Support for Joyent Cloud

* GoGrid Introduces a High-Performance Platform for Predictive Analytics

* MongoDB Hadoop Connector Announced

* StreamBase Releases StreamBase LiveView 1.0

* Pervasive RushAnalyzer and Cloudera Eliminate Barriers to Rapid Hadoop ROI

* Pegasystems Announces Hadoop Big Data Support

* XtremeData Hires Former IBM Analytics Leader

* Lucid Imagination Announces General Availability of LucidWorks Enterprise 2.1

* Of open data and pregnant men

* Is UNQL Dead?

* MySQL in 2012: Report from Percona Live

* For 451 Research clients

# Will new offerings and price cuts encourage greater database-as-a-service adoption? Spotlight report

# Basho expands into cloud storage with Riak CS Impact Report

# SAP modernizes its application stack at the data layer and the mobile front end Impact Report

# QlikTech takes QlikView pricing out of the dark Impact Report

# Kitenga refreshes Hadoop-based content-analysis wares; finds rollouts a slow burn Impact Report

# CoreMedia looks to NoSQL to scale social experiences for its WCM platform Impact Report

# Boundary maps monitoring for ‘big data’ as its path to enterprise Impact Report

# Orchestra to add data quality notes to MDM ensemble as it continues to eye US growth Impact Report

# Columnar database provider SAND Technology puts itself up for sale M&A Insight

# Is it time for Microsoft to ditch partners for performance management and go shopping? Acquirer IQ

And that’s the Data Day, today.

NoSQL has never really been about SQL. As we pointed out in our NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond report, “[one] of the NoSQL idiosyncrasies is that in most cases SQL itself is not the ‘problem’ being avoided. Indeed, a better term might be ‘NoSchema,’ given that a more common quality is a rejection of fixed table schema and join operations”.

Nevertheless the NoSQL term has stuck, and also inspired NewSQL (which, as critics have pointed out, is not really about SQL either), while a number of NoSQL providers started to look at how they could actually add support for SQL queries to their respective databases.

The recently-released version 0.8 of Apache Cassandra features the first implementation of Cassandra Query Language (CQL), an SQL-like query language, for Cassandra.

Meanwhile Couchbase and SQLite have teamed up to create UnQL (Unstructured Query Language), a new data query language for unstructured data. Pronounced ‘uncle’, UnQL is designed to remove the burden of query planning, optimization and execution from NoSQL developers by providing an adaptation of the SQL structured query language for unstructured data models.

As can be seen by an example of the draft syntax, UnQL is designed to be familiar to SQL developers, while also enabling querying over complex and unstructured storage models, such as document models.

UnQL was created by Couchbase CTO and CouchDB creator Damien Katz, alongwith SQLite creator and founder Richard Hipp and both Couchbase and SQLite have committed to implementing UnQL in future versions of their database products.

UnQL is not designed to be specific to select database products, however, and the specification is being released to the public domain at www.unqlspec.org. There is also the potential that open source parsers and query planning implementations will be created to foster adoption.

One of the principle drivers behind UnQL’s development is that a common query language is necessary to drive NoSQL adoption in the same way SQL drove adoption in the relational database market.

It remains to be seen whether UnQL will be picked up by other projects, although the release to the public domain should give confidence that this is not an attempt to force the industry to adopt a ‘standard’ from a single vendor.