News

Splice Machine Readies Cloud Big Data Service

• By David Ramel
• February 8, 2017

Splice Machine Inc. today announced its open source, SQL-based RDBMS platform will soon be available as a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

The company is courting early adopters to take part in an evaluation program and test out the functionality before the service is launched this spring. It said its AWS-hosted, fully managed service will provide data warehouse and RDBMS capabilities in one package.

Splice Machine in November came out with version 2.5 of its platform, touting hybrid capabilities that process online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads at the same time, using components such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

"The new capabilities further emphasize the benefits of Splice Machine's hybrid architecture," CEO and co-founder Monte Zweben said at the time. "For modern applications that need to combine fast data ingestion, Web-scale transactional and analytical workloads, and continuous machine learning, one storage model does not fit all. The Splice Machine SQL RDBMS tightly integrates multiple compute engines, with in-memory and persistent storage in both row-based and columnar formats. The cost-based optimizer uses new advanced statistics to find the optimal execution strategy across all these resources for OLTP and OLAP workloads."

The company hopes its AWS service will obviate the need to use separate components -- such as those offered by AWS -- for Big Data analytics.

"Soon you will be able to go to SpliceMachine.com and provision a clustered, scale-out, hybrid OLTP/OLAP database in minutes, and we will operate it for you," Zweben said in a blog post.

"Instead of provisioning both a cloud RDBMS (like AWS RDS) to run your apps and a cloud data warehouse (like AWS Redshift) to run analytics, now you can provision one hybrid RDBMS. This avoids paying for two engines, duplicate storage, and tons of I/O costs to transfer data, as well as removing all the ETL and operations headaches."

Benefits of the upcoming cloud RDBMS offered through AWS, as listed by the company, include:

• Complete SQL database: Full ANSI-SQL, ACID compliant transactions, secondary indexes, referential integrity, triggers, stored procedures and more.
• Transactional AND analytical workloads: Because Splice Machine is a hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) system, there is no need to stitch together RDBMS's and data warehouses with fragile ETL processes.
• Zero management: Splice Machine manages time-consuming database administration tasks.
• Elasticity: Traditional scale-up databases discourage users from growing their datasets, charging fees for incremental capacity. Splice Machine allows users to add or remove capacity when needed.
• Concurrency: Scale-out architecture means that an unlimited amount of concurrent users and applications can access the database without eroding performance and preserving ACID properties.
• Availability: Splice Machine's incremental backup and recovery backs up to Amazon S3 for true disaster recovery and its scale-out architecture uses replication to ensure availability of service.

"We are now looking for a few very special early adopters of this service," Zweben said. "Back in 1999, Marc Benioff asked me if Blue Martini Software would be the first customer of Salesforce.com. He promised to delight us with white glove service and offered a great financial proposition. They rocked it and to this day I've been a loyal customer. Now I'm looking for our early partners who will also receive great financial incentives and unbelievable white-glove service."

Criteria for participating in the early adopter program are listed as:

• The need to power an application with an RDBMS.
• The need to perform extensive analytics.
• A desire to not have to move data back and forth between data engines.
• Have 5TB to 2PB of data.
• Able to start a trial in Q1 2017.

Interested developers can apply to join the program here.