June 2020 Summaries

SingleStore has named Jordan Tigani as its new chief product officer, bringing extensive experience from his time at Google BigQuery to the role. Tigani will oversee SingleStore's engineering and product teams, aiming to scale operations and expand on cloud products. He is well-versed in technology and database domains, having worked at early-stage startups and spent years in Microsoft Research. The company also recently hired Paul Asmar as vice president of client technical services, focusing on customer success from design to sale. SingleStore aims to provide a single pane of glass for all data analytic workloads with Tigani's help, building on the company's existing cloud products and expanding its product roadmap.

June is typically associated with summer vacations, weddings, and Wimbledon – and the worldwide celebration of Pride Month. But 2020, as we all know, is not a typical year. It’s a year of change and, most importantly, reflection. Throughout history, periods of upheaval are often the genesis of strides toward achieving greater awareness, progress, and change. With parades, and other public celebrations, canceled, Pride Month is still an opportunity to drive momentum related to diversity and inclusion. There are records of movements for LGBTQ rights dating back to the 1920s. But the defining date that catapulted LGBTQ rights to center stage was on June 28, 1969, when the Stonewall Inn bar was raided by the police. This event is now known as “the shot (glass) that was heard around the world” and marked a pivotal moment in the fight for LGBTQ rights. Pride Month celebrates this movement and its ongoing struggle for equality. The month also honors Alan Turing, a pioneer in computer science who designed a computer that helped crack Nazi Germany’s code in World War II. Turing is credited with laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence (AI) and modern computing, including the creation of the Turing Test, a method for determining whether machines can think. Today, AI systems can have meaningful conversations with humans and are often indistinguishable from them. However, true general intelligence remains elusive, and while AI has made significant progress, it is still far from replacing human capabilities. The Turing Test is seen as a milestone in the development of AI, but its limitations mean that innovation is an ongoing journey rather than a destination.

SingleStore marked Juneteenth by observing a minute of silence, scheduling programming related to systemic racism and the Black experience in America, and establishing it as an annual company holiday. Employees were invited to learn about the need for better treatment of Black Americans and participate in discussions on documentaries, films, and podcasts. The company also planned a virtual STEM/STEAM Day event for underserved children with co-sponsors Cisco and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women-Silicon Valley Chapter. SingleStore's Diversity & Inclusion efforts aim to address barriers people of color face in job opportunities, and the company is working to hire individuals who can bring diverse perspectives and approaches to the table. Research shows that resumes with names like Jamal or LaToya are more likely to be rejected than those with names like Michael or Lisa, highlighting the challenges people of color face during the recruiting process. To mitigate these challenges, SingleStore's hiring process includes asking questions about skill sets, culture fit, and how to bring new perspectives to the table. The company recognizes that conscious efforts toward diversity drive innovation and increase creativity.

Join us for an in-depth discussion with Nikita Shamgunov, SingleStore co-CEO, and David Yakobovitch, the founder of the HumAIn Podcast, covers a range of topics related to data management and digital transformation during COVID-19. Nikita shares his predictions on how COVID-19 will change data management and digital transformation, highlighting the importance of technology and people working together to deliver value. He also emphasizes the role that big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook can play in helping during the pandemic, as well as the potential for individuals to make a difference through volunteering and using technology for good causes.

In a rapidly changing market, Telgoo5 Technology, a provider of customer service-as-a-service and online charging systems for mobile telecom operators, found its solution in SingleStore, a fully distributed relational database with full SQL support and high concurrency. Previously relying on MySQL-based solutions, Telgoo5 experienced frequent downtime, missed connections, and performance issues due to manual sharding and lack of scalability. After migrating to SingleStore, the company achieved significant improvements, including nearly 80% faster connection times, reduced downtime, increased business scale, and enhanced flexibility. With its new infrastructure, Telgoo5 can now run machine learning models and AI programs, providing a competitive edge in the telecom billing and revenue management market. The company's CEO, Sandip Mehra, attributes their success to SingleStore's cloud-native solution, ease of operations, and scalability, enabling them to grow their business while maintaining excellent customer satisfaction. With SingleStore, Telgoo5 is well-positioned to address the growing demand for 5G services, providing real-time charging and customer rating capabilities with faster response times.

Juneteenth commemorates a historic day in June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom following the end of the Civil War. Despite being over 155 years since this event, racism remains a pervasive issue in American society, causing ongoing pain and inequality for African Americans. The Black Lives Matter movement aims to address these injustices by amplifying marginalized voices and promoting human rights. SingleStore is observing Juneteenth with a minute of silence, presentations, and employee days off to educate themselves on African American history and related issues, highlighting the importance of standing in solidarity against racism and promoting inclusivity.

The Apache Spark Connector version 3.0 has been released by SingleStore, offering several enhancements and improvements over previous versions. The new connector supports robust SQL pushdown, is compatible with the latest versions of Spark and the SingleStore engine, and provides flexible load data compression options to expedite data ingest. It can be used as a true Spark Data Source, supporting various programming languages such as Scala, Python, Java, SQL, and R. The connector also offers tight integration with Spark's DataSource API, making it easier to use and maintain. Its compatibility with recent versions of Spark (versions 2.3 and 2.4) ensures seamless integration with existing workloads. With its advanced features, the SingleStore Spark Connector version 3.0 enables users to accelerate their workload using Apache Spark and SingleStore together.

SingleStore is powering in-the-moment analytics for True Digital Group's COVID-19 tracking in Thailand, enabling the Thai government to track population movement and adapt policies in real-time. The web portal uses anonymized cell phone location data on 500,000 location events every second to provide a view of population densities, helping authorities quickly respond to large gatherings. True Digital Group partnered with SingleStore due to its reputation for speed, scale, and structured query language (SQL), which enabled the fast ingestion of events and geospatial functions used to plot data on a map in real-time. The solution was built in under two weeks, and the partnership aims to save lives through proactive insights on streaming and geospatial data.

In an interview with Forbes, Nikita Shamgunov, co-CEO and co-founder of SingleStore, discusses the vast potential of data, which he believes can enable previously unimaginable capabilities. As datasets grow in size, they require immense storage capacity that is virtually limitless. Shamgunov stresses the need for a comprehensive data strategy that provides 360-degree visibility, appoints a chief data officer to champion this effort, and incorporates elements such as artificial intelligence, data management, and user experience. He emphasizes the importance of harnessing data's full potential to unlock new possibilities.

** SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 introduces Universal Storage, a feature that advances the company's patented technology to support both high-performance hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) workloads and operational analytics at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The new release includes several capabilities such as hash indexes on columnstores, sub-segment access, row-level locking for columnstores, SPARSE compression for rowstores, and the support for single-column unique keys on columnstores. These features make it easier to achieve near-rowstore performance for selective queries while maintaining columnstore costs. Universal Storage allows SingleStore to support both large-scale HTAP workloads and smaller OLTP workloads with high performance and excellent price-performance. The release also includes improvements to the performance of uniqueness checking, highly-selective joins on columnstores, and benefits compared to no indexes. Additionally, SingleStore is continuing to advance its Universal Storage technology with future releases planned to include multi-column unique keys on columnstores and UPSERT support for columnstores.