News

Database Startup GenieDB Bringing MySQL to the Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• August 6, 2013

Distributed database startup GenieDB added to the burgeoning "as-a-Service" market this week with the release of a MySQL-based Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). The company's cloud-hosted service is designed to manage data distributed across large geographic distances and multiple cloud providers. It's built natively on MySQL with full support for SQL and relational models, and it aims to provide an automated platform to build Web-scale apps that "gain the benefits of geographical database distribution… continuous availability during regional outages… and better application response time for globally distributed users," the company says.

"While our product won't melt away your waistline, serve as an amazing do-it-all 'Omnitool,' or help you stop snoring," GenieDB CEO Cary Breese said in a blog post, "we get pretty fired up when we think about our customers who are now able to serve up cloud-based applications to an increasingly mobile workforce that demands fast access from anywhere in the world around the clock."

Headquartered in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., GenieDB was founded in 2008 to provide a SQL-compliant database based on an asynchronous, peer-to-peer, decentralized database architecture. Guaranteeing ACID transactions, the database scales out/in elastically on decentralized computing resources in the cloud, on-premises, or both, the company says. The company debuted GenieDB Enterprise 2.0, a preview version of an upgrade of its flagship DB service, in April.

Earlier this year, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL 5.6, the latest release of the open source relational database management system. The new version took on the growing field of NoSQL competitors, such as MongoDB, CouchDB and Cassandra, with features and enhancements aimed at improving query execution times, availability and scalability.

"MySQL 5.6 represents a significant boost in performance and scalability for the database that many of the largest Web-facing organizations in the world rely upon for their mission critical applications," Breese said in an earlier statement. His company's solution transforms MySQL into a "highly available, resilient and multi-datacenter platform, specifically designed for highly distributed, failure-prone cloud environments," he said.

Breese emphasized that the GenieDB offering (officially named Globally Distributed MySQL-as-a-Service) is a 100 percent MySQL service, and definitely not NoSQL. "The technology provides an easy-to-use platform that overcomes the difficulties of managing a fully distributed database in the cloud, while allowing organizations to continue to use native MySQL," he said.

GenieDB's MySQL-as-a-Service is available through Amazon Web Services , the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace and the HP Cloud.