December 2022 Summaries

The latest release of SingleStoreDB (version 8.0) introduces over a dozen new features and tools to build powerful real-time applications and analytics, including support for graph and tree data processing with recursive common table expressions, fast transaction processing on string and JSON data with Universal Storage, enhanced security, improved incremental backup performance, Wasm programmability everywhere, faster transactions and analytics, and more. The release also includes a native driver for Laravel, enabling developers to work seamlessly with SingleStoreDB, as well as a new Cognos connector for IBM Cognos Analytics. Additionally, the Playground provides a free, open "Hello World" experience to users unfamiliar with SingleStoreDB, while the guided tour onboarding experience simplifies the process of getting started with the platform. With 8.0, SingleStoreDB offers improved security, observability, and scaling capabilities, including federated authentication using OAuth, suspend & resume compute for Workspaces, real-time and historical monitoring, and more.

At SingleStore, a company comprised of results-oriented individuals who value creativity and fun, they've developed a process that sparks innovation and thoughtfulness across all aspects of the organization. This drive for results is fueled by an inner hunger and passion, while maintaining a sense of playfulness allows them to enjoy the journey. The marketing team's efforts with billboards showcase this balance between intention and humor, inspiring others to adopt a similar approach in their own organizations. A culture of creativity is fostered by promoting, practicing, and permitting creative thinking, which is essential for overcoming challenges and succeeding in rapidly changing times. Despite relying on technology like machine learning and AI, the company values the input of creative thinkers who bring new ideas to the table, recognizing that people are what make technology effective.

At SingleStore, we aim to create the ultimate database that powers all our customers' needs. We've already achieved world-class performance across demanding workloads but recognize the importance of ease of use and monitoring. To address this, we've introduced three new monitoring features in Singlestore Helios: real-time utilization metrics, storage breakdown by database, and historical monitoring. Real-time utilization metrics provide a snapshot of CPU, memory, and cache usage across Workspaces, while storage breakdowns show how much memory and disk space each database uses. Historical monitoring offers a zero-setup integration with Grafana, providing a time-series view of system performance, queries, and rows written and read per second, aiding in future planning. These improvements enhance SingleStoreDB's ease of use and usability, setting the stage for further innovations.

The SingleStore Universal Storage is a single table type that supports both analytical and transactional workloads. It uses a columnstore format, enhanced for seekability. The new release of SingleStoreDB (8.0) introduces significant improvements in seeking into JSON and string data, with orders-of-magnitude performance gains. Fast seeks enable faster updates by avoiding the need to scan entire segments of data. Universal Storage tables are organized differently in 8.0 to enable fast row lookups for JSON data, using a new SingleStore-encoded Parquet (S2EP) data format. This simplifies designs and reduces hardware requirements, while maintaining excellent performance across both operational and analytical workloads. The improvements also include faster update and delete performance for changes affecting small percentages of rows, with significant speedups in TPC-C results illustrating these gains.

Companies are driving their systems to make decisions at crucial points in business, powering real-time enterprises and real-time decision making. The real-time enterprise is a journey that will evolve, requiring a "single store" that takes the best of independent data stores to facilitate decision making. Having data in one place is already a big win, as seen with companies like GE, Impact, Siemens, Armis, and Kellogg's using SingleStoreDB. Real-time enterprises live in a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and organizations need to understand this ecosystem and leverage partners to achieve their vision. To help navigate this, SingleStore has introduced a new Technology Partner Program called SingleStore Connect, which is a central place for partners and customers to discover and engage with the SingleStore Ecosystem. This program includes multiple categories to find the right partner matching needs, and welcomes new partners such as CData, StepZen, Sapper, SAS, Arcion Labs, Intel, Hopara, Chooch, who are working together to deliver powerful solutions that simplify data access and accelerate speed-to-decision for real-time enterprises.

AWS re:Invent has become the premier technology conference, attracting a large audience and showcasing innovative technologies and partnerships. SingleStore showcased its database solutions at the event, demonstrating real-time applications and customer-facing analytics with its SingleStoreDB. The company's vision is to unify and simplify modern real-time data, and it has achieved this through its database technology, which reduces data movement, duplication, and simplifies application design. This approach has been recognized as a perfect match for IBM's goal to simplify and broaden the use of AI. The conference also saw announcements from AWS, including zero ETL, new serverless capabilities, and a shift towards general-purpose relational SQL databases. SingleStore's focus on unifying and simplifying modern real-time data sets it apart from other database companies, and its technology has been praised by users as "absolutely magical" and "the database of our dreams".

SingleStoreDB release 8.0 offers a comprehensive solution that addresses the need for speed, reliability, and ease in database systems, allowing customers to build applications without compromising on any of these aspects. The new release provides significant performance gains, including sub-second latency for structured and semi-structured data, as well as real-time analytics capabilities with columnstores for JSON data. Additionally, it introduces features such as Recursive Common Table Expressions (CTEs) for hierarchical data and support for Web Assembly (Wasm) for C/C++/Rust and Python development, making the database more accessible to a wider range of developers. The release also expands the partner ecosystem with new connectors for popular BI tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Google Looker. With SingleStoreDB 8.0, customers can now build applications that are fast, reliable, and easy to use, without sacrificing any of these critical aspects.

We've added new connectors to our database, SingleStoreDB, which allow developers to work seamlessly with popular PHP and Python frameworks Laravel and Python respectively. The Laravel connector is now ready for production use and has undergone 12 contributions since its initial release in June. It supports features such as shard keys and JSON, making it ideal for building modern web applications quickly. The Python connector, dubbed "Super Velocity" mode, boasts speeds of up to 10x faster than PyMySQL, the original pure-python MySQL client. Additionally, SingleStoreDB now supports SQLAlchemy and Ibis, two popular libraries in the Python ecosystem, allowing developers to leverage their existing skills with our database.

The Forrester Wave report on translytical data platforms, released in Q4 2022, examines the top 15 providers of this category. Translytical platforms are next-generation data platforms designed to support multiple data types and models, with a focus on transactional, operational, and analytical workloads. The report highlights three key takeaways: organizations should look for vendors that accelerate primary business use cases, provide comprehensive data management capabilities, and deliver integrated management support for data integration and security. SingleStore is recognized as a Strong Performer due to its architecture designed to power translytical workloads, including a real-time, translytical database. Reference customers praise SingleStore's ability to solve complex problems quickly and its vendor's deep understanding of their business needs.