Aerospike Vies To Advance NoSQL Database

Performance is important because many of the data sets are so large, according to Das.

SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and a host of other major companies are building big data features into their existing databases and applications already, however, so there are plenty of big data platforms available, Das said.

And there is no shortage of NoSQL data stores, most of them open source and optimized for big data.

What is really in short supply are tools that integrate neatly with those data-crunching platforms to gather, clean, tag, store, and index unstructured data that few companies have ever tried to incorporate into their master databases, she said.

"Most of the activity in that area is from startups right now, so you won't see many of them in major products until there are some more acquisitions or until the market matures to point that these functions are more widely available," Das said.

Aerospike itself is a startup, which announced a new round of funding at the same time it announced its new product features and acquisition. Aerospike's Series B funding round raised an undisclosed amount from New Enterprise Associates, Draper Associates, and Alsop Louie Partners; the latter two were key backers during the company's first round.

Most of the best-regarded products are also either open source software or are based on open source with layers of proprietary enhancements to add new functions, Boyarski said.

Jaspersoft's main NoSQL product set is open source, as is Aerospike's, though Aerospike's proprietary enhancements shift the whole suite into the world of commercial software.

To keep from alienating open source developers and keep the latest enhancements moving into its products as well, Aerospike reversed course by releasing an open sourced version of its NoSQL database, the Aerospike Community Edition.

It shares most functions with the Enterprise version, but comes with a free unlimited license, supports a single cluster of two nodes in one data center, and has an upper data-storage limit of 200 GB.

The Enterprise Edition supports multiple data centers, multiple server clusters of any size, and replication between data centers, and offers 24-hour support.

Despite its real-time performance and claims of high throughput, Aerospike will face considerable competition both from other commercial software companies, open source software, and traditional applications and databases tweaked to provide big data-like benefits, according to Das' evaluation of the big data software market.

Jaspersoft's survey confirms the competition from unusual directions. Relational databases are the most common data store cited by respondents to the survey, followed by MongoDB (cited by 19%), Hadoop (18%), analytic databases from Teradata, Vertica and similar vendors (11%), Google's BigQuery (8%), Hbase (8%), and Cassandra (7%).

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