July 2020 Summaries

SingleStore technology has been successfully used by Bahwan Cybertek (BCT), a Middle Eastern technology company, to track COVID-19 spread in the region. The effort involves collecting data from 1.2 billion location points and aggregating it into cities, districts, and regions to provide an understanding of point-in-time population density. The technology proved more efficient than alternatives like Teradata and Hadoop, with SingleStore replying to a complex query in just 20 minutes compared to over a day for the other solutions. This project showcases the power of digital transformation and massively scalable architecture, highlighting SingleStore's ability to manage workloads at a massive scale, pull in data from diverse systems, and answer SQL queries quickly. The partnership demonstrates BCT's expertise in digital experience, supply chain management, and predictive analytics, while also leveraging its relationships with customers to deliver maximum value from technology investments.

The company, a leading industrial machinery producer, is transitioning from slow and complex data infrastructure powered by Microsoft SQL Server to SingleStore, a fully scalable relational database that supports SQL. The need for speed arose from the growing demand for analytics in their internal financial reporting application, Cadence, which was initially supported by direct SQL queries and widely used business intelligence tools. However, as the demand increased, performance became a problem, and the company tried using Microsoft SQL Server's cubes feature, but it was too slow and complex to handle. They found SingleStore through a Google search for "fastest in-memory database" and were impressed by its performance, compatibility with their existing BI tools, and operational simplicity. The company has seen 10x to 100x performance improvements compared to SQL Server and is now planning to replace other database implementations with SingleStore instances.

Tapjoy, an advertising and app monetization company, moved to SingleStore from MySQL due to performance issues with their workload running on MySQL. The team assessed alternatives, considering factors such as ACID compliance, scalability, 10x-capability, and drop-in replacement. After testing, they found that SingleStore met all their requirements, offering huge performance gains, including a 55 times faster data point sum for finance operations and an 1500x improvement in monthly reporting time. SingleStore's design from scratch addressed Tapjoy's demanding scalability needs, making it a clear winner in load tests. The company has since adopted SingleStore for several use cases, demonstrating its value in meeting their challenging data issues.

The SingleStore company has established a strategic partnership with Latin America Business Consulting (LATBC) to provide service, support in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. LATBC will be the exclusive reseller for SingleStore in this region, offering pre-sales and post-sales services, delivery, and support. This partnership aims to deliver cutting-edge technologies to businesses in the region, enabling them to be globally competitive with data as their most important asset. The company's co-CEO Raj Verma expressed excitement about welcoming LATBC as a strategic partner, highlighting the alignment of LATBC's characteristics with SingleStore's ideal partner requirements. LATBC's founder and CEO Xavier Espinosa de los Monteros emphasized the importance of innovation and embracing new models to drive growth and success in the data economy.

The discussion between Raj Verma, co-CEO of SingleStore, and Kevin Craine, host of the Digital Transformation Podcast, explores how digital transformation has shifted from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-do" in response to COVID-19. The conversation highlights how software and data have enabled businesses to plan strategies for their COVID-19 response and recovery, with Raj sharing advice on reframing business strategies. As companies navigate this period of rapid change, the discussion provides insights into 10 key areas that can help them emerge stronger, as individuals, as companies, and economically.

The new approach to failover in SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.1 aims to improve the availability and performance of the database by distributing data redundantly across multiple leaf nodes, reducing the impact of node failures on query performance. In this new approach, the partition placement algorithm distributes master copies of partitions evenly across leaves, and then distributes replicas needed by any one leaf node across multiple other leaf nodes. This reduces the creation of hot spots that can slow down queries after a node failure. The feature is enabled through a global variable called `leaf_failover_fanout`, which determines whether to use load-balanced or paired failover modes, with load-balanced mode providing better performance and reduced buffer space requirements. The upgrade process for existing databases involves setting the global variable to 'load_balanced' and running REBALANCE operations, which may incur costs such as bandwidth, time, and disk space. Overall, the new approach is designed to provide improved availability, performance, and flexibility in managing database failures.

SingleStore has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), joining the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program to accelerate customer migration to cloud-based operational analytics. This collaboration enables customers to harness their operational data at scale, leveraging AWS services like Apache Kafka and Amazon SageMaker for streaming data and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). With SingleStore's modern data architecture, customers can benefit from a blueprint for adoption, robust technology, and other resources to enable real-time operational analytics. The expanded collaboration comes at a time when Gartner expects three-fourths of databases to be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022, and is particularly relevant for financial services companies that need to manage time series data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of data and chief data officers (CDOs) in progressive companies. Data has incredible potential to enable organizations to deliver better performance, financial results, and user experiences. The use of contact tracing technology, which involves accessing mobile phone records to identify people who were in the vicinity of an infected person, poses obvious privacy concerns. However, this technology also has the power to help prevent the spread of the virus by identifying clusters of infections and predicting where the spread is going to happen next. To harness data correctly, companies need a data strategy and a champion, such as a CDO, who can drive data-driven insights and optimize experiences. This requires vast and essentially bottomless storage and infinite compute power, which cloud technology provides. The global pandemic has made it essential for businesses and institutions to keep a pulse on their data and understand not just how many cases there are but also how people are moving around.

** SingleStore is contributing to the SafeGraph COVID-19 Data Consortium, providing free access to coronavirus-related data through its software, and creating a repository to help customers use the software for processing such data, while joining over 1,000 organizations in the consortium. The company has created a set of scripts and SQL files to help users get started with using existing SafeGraph and American Census data on SingleStore, and encourages data-led approaches to addressing the coronavirus crisis. To get started, users can create a Singlestore Helios trial, clone the datasets repository from GitHub, load the data into their cluster, run initial queries, and explore the capabilities of SingleStore for COVID-19 research.

SingleStore has released a new Install UI that provides an easier method to install clusters compared to their existing command-line interface. This new user interface complements the CLI and allows users to install SingleStore clusters in six easy steps, including installing deployment packages, linking to the Deploy UI, reviewing system requirements, provisioning hosts, configuring the cluster, confirming configuration, and optionally connecting to SingleStore Studio. The new interface improves the experience by providing a more accessible alternative to command-line installation methods, allowing users to quickly generate and access real-time insights from their data.