May 2020 Summaries

SingleStore offers free self-paced training courses designed to be engaging, interactive, and accessible to SQL users. The training covers various aspects of SingleStore, including its features, data ingestion, query tuning, time series data capture and analysis, procedural SQL, and working with JSON data. The training is hands-on, allowing learners to create pipelines and exercises during the course. SingleStore plans to expand its training content to include administrator modules, full-text indexes, geospatial data, query hints, benchmarking and tuning, window functions, and other topics. Learners can access the free training courses on the SingleStore website and provide feedback to help improve the content.

With the SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 release, the company aims to simplify data platforms by offering speed, scalability, and SQL access to everyone. This is achieved through the introduction of SingleStore Universal Storage, which unifies transactions and analytics in a single table, reducing the need for separate specialized technologies. The new release also enhances resiliency with fast DR failback capabilities, allowing for quicker recovery from failures. Additionally, it extends programming language support and adds features such as incremental backups to cloud storage and online upgrades without downtime. Overall, the 7.1 release aims to provide a more streamlined data platform experience, making it easier to use and manage.

The new SingleStore Tools approach is designed to simplify the management of downloadable SingleStoreDB Self-Managed. It offers a stateless runtime that communicates directly with the SingleStore engine, providing security and stability improvements. The toolset includes features like pre-installation configuration checking, online upgrades, improved backup management, cluster reporting, and put file capability. These capabilities are only available in SingleStore Tools, so it's essential to use the latest version to take full advantage of the added features. The new toolset is designed to be secure by default, with all communication over SSH and an internal protocol compatible with MySQL wire protocol. It also offers fully automated online upgrades, simple and scalable cluster deployment using cluster configuration templates, integration directly with existing DevOps tools, machine-parsable outputs for every command, and a lightweight client application that allows running SQL queries against SingleStore. The toolset provides an easy-to-use migration process from the legacy SingleStore Ops to manage clusters with SingleStore Tools.

SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 is now available for immediate download and supports real-time analytics and augmented transaction processing with improved resilience features, limitless scalability, high availability, disaster recovery support, and full SQL. The new release delivers Universal Storage technology, which excels at analytics and improves OLTP, including support for indexes, unique keys, seeks, and fast, highly selective nested-loop-style joins. SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 also features improved resilience with fast DR failback, easier stored procedure programming for transactional applications, new built-in functions to ease application development and migration, and more. The release is available on Singlestore Helios, the company’s elastic cloud database, and supports loading data through pipelines from a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket, as well as backing up and restoring databases directly from a GCS bucket.

The SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 release introduces a new feature called fast disaster recovery failback (DR failback), which enables users to quickly switch between primary and secondary clusters in case of failures or upgrades. The new feature uses a faster replication method, allowing for much quicker failback times, typically minutes instead of hours or days. This improvement also lays the groundwork for a future point-in-time restore feature. The release includes other enhancements, such as improved replication capabilities and a new command-line tool to facilitate faster failback and recovery processes.

SingleStore has announced that George Kadifa, a seasoned technology executive with three decades of experience in the database industry, will join the company as an advisor. As a co-founder and Managing Director of Sumeru Equity Partners, Kadifa brings significant expertise to help SingleStore accelerate its growth. With a background running large data management businesses at HP and Oracle, Kadifa's guidance is expected to be invaluable to SingleStore's hyper-growth stage. He has also held leadership positions at IBM, Oracle, Corio Corp., Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and Xerox, providing SingleStore with relevant industry connections. Kadifa is excited about the emerging space of data insights and cloud-native applications, seeing SingleStore as a key player in this area, and looks forward to drawing on his expertise to help further the company's growth trajectory.

The new functionality in SingleStore-Report allows users to run environment validation checks before installing the database, ensuring that machines are properly configured for optimal performance and minimizing future problems. This is crucial for high-performance databases like SingleStore, which require careful configuration to function at their best. The report module collects a series of checks on settings based on SingleStore-recommended best practices, providing users with a clear path to identify potential issues before proceeding with the installation process. By using this feature, users can ensure that their system is set up properly, reducing the risk of performance issues and ensuring that their database is production-ready.

SingleStore has signed a debt facility with Hercules Capital for up to $50 million, providing non-dilutive financing to accelerate growth, following its impressive 70% annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth in FY20. The company is backed by prominent venture capital firms such as GV and Khosla Ventures, and has hundreds of enterprise customers, including those within the Fortune 500. SingleStore's converged data platform delivers breakthroughs for modern data workloads, with a strong focus on customer success and community involvement. This structured investment from Hercules represents a significant commitment to support SingleStore's growth-oriented strategy, with Steve Kuo noting that the company is "one of the promising companies in the database market".

True Digital Group is using SingleStore to power a contact tracing app in Thailand, which uses React and Web Workers in the frontend. The app processes fast ingestion of events and geospatial functions to plot data on a map in real-time. The solution was built in two weeks and aims to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by tracking how mass population moves from one part of the country to another. SingleStore provides a scalable backend, combining transactional and analytical databases, with specialized data types and functions supporting geospatial, time-series, document, and key-value use cases. The app supports queries by location over a recent history of data, allowing users to see trends over time. With SingleStore, True Digital Group can rapidly develop and iterate on the application, demonstrating new possibilities for analysis to support public health efforts.

SingleStore and Fiddler Labs are collaborating to offer SingleStore's capabilities to users of Fiddler's toolset, which provides explainable AI. SingleStore is well-suited for operationalizing AI by processing various types of data with fast ingest speeds, high concurrency, and unmatched query responsiveness. Fiddler provides a vital need for explainable AI in the real world, allowing business analytics and data science teams to build and deploy models that are inherently explainable. By complementing SingleStore's industry-leading capability with Fiddler's Explainable AI Platform, businesses can analyze customer churn accurately and respond to shifting needs quickly. The integration enables easy import of data from SingleStore into Fiddler, allowing users to create interactive dashboards for business users and self-serve to understand why customers are likely to churn. This collaboration offers a powerful solution for operationalizing AI and providing explainable insights in minutes.

This blog post covers various aspects of Kubernetes, including its history, statefulsets, and deployment mechanisms. Rob Richardson, a technical evangelist at SingleStore, discusses how Kubernetes can be used to manage stateless and stateful workloads, and provides examples of how SingleStore database software can be integrated with Kubernetes. The post also touches on topics such as containerization, platform-as-a-service, and the importance of separating concerns between developers and operations teams. Additionally, it addresses common questions and scenarios related to Kubernetes, including provisioning volume storage, using Ingress controllers, and choosing between containers and virtual machines. Overall, the post aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Kubernetes and its applications in managing modern software systems.

The oil and gas company faced significant challenges with its previous infrastructure, including slow and limited data processing operations, poor concurrency, and inadequate analytics capabilities. The company's ability to bring in and process large amounts of IoT-generated data was severely handicapped by these limitations, resulting in missed opportunities for cost savings and revenue growth. In an effort to address these issues, the company replaced its existing NoSQL databases with SingleStoreDB, a real-time distributed SQL database that delivers price-performance, scalability, and SQL support. The new system has enabled the company to generate financial forecasts multiple times a day, with much greater performance, flexibility, and profitability than with its previous infrastructure.