News

NuoDB Adds Geo-Distro to NewSQL Database

• By John K. Waters
• November 7, 2013

NewSQL startup NuoDB has released an update of its distributed relational database management system (DBMS).

The spotlight enhancement in the 2.0 release, code-named "Blackbirds," is an optimization of its "geo-distribution" capability, which allows users to make it the single logical database in multiple geographies. According to the company, NuoDB is the first NewSQL system to provide with the ability to run a database across physically separate geographic regions.

NewSQL is the scalable SQL system currently going head-to-head with NoSQL. It's a true SQL service, offering full support for SQL queries, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) transactions, standard SQL language support and relational logic. As the company puts it, NuoDB "presents a new kind of peer-to-peer, on-demand independence that yields high availability, low-latency and a deployment model that is easy to manage."

At its heart, NewSQL is about scaling out, not scaling up, explained Barry Morris, NuoDB CEO and co-founder (with Jim Starkey). "This is a system that gives you genuinely dynamically scalable capacity," Morris told ADTmag. "It's a system that could be running at a million transactions per second, and you add more commodity machines, virtual machines, or cloud machines to the system, while its running, and you get increased performance. And it's an elastic scalability; you can scale up or down at any time. As long as at least one of those machines is still running, you still have your database online, running, and complete."

The release adds a number of enhancements to the DBMS, including an auto administration feature for database provisioning, monitoring and management; stored procedures with Java language support; more built-in ANSI standard Scalar Functions; a new SQL parser and query optimizer; extended SQL support for the Drupal CMS v7; and unixODBC support.

With the Blackbirds release, NuoDB is also officially supporting real-time migration from MySQL to NuoDB with the Tungsten Replicator, the open-source data replication engine for MySQL and other databases, sponsored by database-as-a-service company Continuent.

During the Webcast launch of the Blackbirds release, Morris called on executives from VoIP platform provider Fathom Voice, who used NuoDB in their Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters. Cameron Weeks, the company's CEO and co-founder, explained that Fathom used the DBMS to establish a single, logical database that could be shared across multiple Amazon AWS servers in different geographies; updated in real-time; and automatically scaled out during peak demand.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the two-year-old NuoDB is keeping up the steady release cadence established with the release of NuoDB 1.0 in January 2013, and version 1.1 in May. Version 1.2, code named "Starling," was released in August.

The NuoDB system runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, and developers can use Java, C++, Hibernate, JRuby, nodeJS, and PHP. It also runs on Amazon, Google, or a local machine. It comes in three editions: a Pro edition, for commercial use on a pay-as-you-scale basis; a free-for-development edition; and a Cloud edition for Amazon's AWS. More information is available here.