January 2022 Summaries

SingleStore, a modern database designed for data-intensive applications, eliminates the need for table range partitioning by offering faster deletion speeds and more efficient data management processes. Unlike legacy databases that rely on this outdated technique to manage data lifecycles, SingleStore achieves similar results through bulk loading, SQL INSERT and DELETE operations, and columnstore sort keys, which provide a coarse form of indexing. By leveraging its speed at adding and removing data, SingleStore provides a more streamlined and efficient approach to data lifecycle management, making range partitioning unnecessary for users who want to focus on query processing rather than complex data management processes. With SingleStore's ability to delete data phenomenally fast, users can quickly remove old data without the need for cumbersome partitioning operations.

I've been fascinated by Oracle database technology since my college days when I first took a class on it. Over the years, I worked extensively with various versions of the Oracle database, including upgrades, security, backup, and recovery, as well as performance tuning and implementing high availability solutions. I even co-authored the Oracle Exadata Expert's Handbook and have spoken at numerous technology conferences, including Collaborate and the Heartland OUG Conference. Recently, I joined Oracle Corporation as a Principal Sales Consultant, where I focused on creating solution architectures for Oracle's cloud technology and infrastructure. However, my career took an exciting turn when I discovered SingleStore, a modern database platform that offers blazing-fast performance, SQL-based RDBMS capabilities, and innovative features like columnar compression, high availability, data redundancy, real-time reporting, built-in segment elimination, sharding, and SingleStore Pipelines. These features make SingleStore a compelling alternative to Oracle, offering superior performance at a fraction of the cost. I've had the opportunity to work with leading enterprise customers who have migrated from Oracle RAC and Exadata to SingleStore, and I'm now part of a growing company that's helping customers unleash the power of their data with a single database for all data-intensive applications.

What is the one thing that if it was taken away, it would irrevocably cripple your business? It is your data. Your data is all the information you store about your company and how it operates, telling you who your customers are, how much money you have in receivables, the state of your supply chain, and more. Data is considered the most important asset for any company, as its loss would be difficult to recover from and could lead to significant consequences. The value of data lies not only in its existence but also in its accessibility, durability, and safety, which are crucial for businesses to function effectively and make informed decisions.

Akmal Chaudhri, a Developer Advocate at SingleStore, has joined the company to help developers understand the technology's benefits and address business leaders' pain points. SingleStore's strong appeal lies in its ability to serve data-intensive applications across various industries, including finance, advertising, IoT, and healthcare wearables. The company's focus on relational database technology and its capabilities in supporting transactions, analytics, JSON, time series, and geospatial data make it an attractive option for developers and business leaders alike. With Akmal's expertise, SingleStore aims to raise awareness about its "best kept secret" technology, which can help businesses solve practical problems and improve their competitive edge. As a London-based Developer Advocate, Akmal plans to work closely with developers, executives, and the industry to showcase SingleStore's capabilities and provide valuable resources for upskilling developers.

As we start the new year, we wanted to share a few highlights from SingleStore's 2021 customer, product and developer community news. In 2021, SingleStore added the most new customers ever in its history, expanded use significantly with existing customers, and celebrated several IPOs among them. The company's cloud database solved for data-intensive applications' common challenges such as data bottlenecks across dimensions like size, speed of ingestion, latency, query complexity, and concurrency. SingleStore was also recognized for its mission-critical capabilities, including system of record features, security enhancements, ease of use improvements, and technology ecosystem expansions. The company launched a developer hub, named ambassadors to the community, and contributed to advancing the state of the art in cloud native computing. Looking ahead to 2022, SingleStore is excited about big plans across its community, customer, and product areas, aiming to bring together modern data to make it work for customers in moments that matter.

SingleStoreDB is a database system designed to satisfy both transactional and analytical workloads, achieving state-of-the-art performance across OLTP and OLAP workloads. It runs demanding production workloads for large financial, telecom, high-tech, and energy companies, often replacing multiple databases with SingleStoreDB. The results from TPC-H and TPC-C benchmarks demonstrate that SingleStoreDB achieves competitive performance on both analytical and transactional workloads, outperforming cloud data warehouses like CDW1 and CDW2, while also surpassing an operational database like CDB. SingleStoreDB's Universal Storage allows it to deliver world-class performance on both OLTP and OLAP workloads in the same database and tables, with excellent scalability on larger TPC-C sizes. The system is designed to meet workload requirements that previously required using multiple specialized database systems, making it an attractive option for organizations seeking a unified solution.

SingleStore is eliminating the DeWitt Clause from its contract, allowing greater transparency around database performance among themselves and industry competitors. The company aims to push boundaries of database performance and share technology innovations with customers and the industry, while promoting open discussion and comparison of different database products. This move follows a shift away from industry standards that previously stifled open competition and innovation by forbidding users from publishing benchmarks without approval. SingleStore is now implementing a "DeWitt Openness Clause" to require competitors to benchmark their databases in an open and transparent manner, promoting transparency and reproducibility of results. The company believes its users should be able to benchmark SingleStore freely, access information about database products, and see the results for themselves.

A key-value store is a non-relational database that utilizes a hashtable or dictionary as its underlying data model. It uses a simple key-value method to store data, making it scalable and performant. SingleStore can be used as a key-value store on an application, offering advantages such as cost savings by using a single database, leveraging existing skills with SQL compatibility, simplifying architecture, and increasing speed with ultra-fast data ingestion and sub-second latencies. To use SingleStore as a key-value store, one needs to create a free database cluster, select the in-memory rowstore table, and define a schema that includes a primary key and hash index. The example demonstrates how to connect to the database using Node.js, insert and read data, and run performance tests. By using SingleStore as a key-value store, developers can simplify their architecture while maintaining high performance and scalability.

Modern business cannot run on legacy technology, and Hadoop's slow performance, high costs, and complexity are a strong case in point. As of 2022, the benefits that were once attractive to organizations with Hadoop have worn off, and many companies that initially adopted it for cost savings and analytics performance have since moved on to cloud services like AWS or Azure. However, those years of investment in Hadoop can still pose significant challenges, particularly when it comes to migration, downtime, and maintenance. In contrast, SingleStore offers a streamlined and cost-effective path to modernity, allowing organizations to augment or replace their Hadoop infrastructure with options to deploy on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

SingleStore has successfully unified transactions and analytics in a single database, challenging the long-held belief that these two functions require separate systems. By starting with an in-memory database, scaling out to distributed architecture, adding persistence and ACID transactions, and incorporating column stores for fast scans and aggregations, SingleStore has achieved a unified database that can execute both transactional and analytical workloads concurrently. The system's design prioritizes low latency for both reads and writes, high availability, durability, and scalability, making it suitable for modern data warehouses that need to scale to petabytes of storage and perform complex analytics on large datasets.