One of the top trends shaping industries right now is application sprawl. Enterprises have a ballooning number of applications deployed on their IT systems, and it is a crucial element to their becoming first-class enterprises.
At the user end, there’s an infinite number of software that are designed to trim down the slog and struggle with quick and easy one-click operations. There are wealth management apps to help plan and monitor investments from self-service dashboards, cybersecurity applications to keep you in the know, and predict and prevent attacks, analytics applications providing pre-packaged intelligence.
As diverse an ecosystem as it is, modern applications all aim to serve the same set of requirements – lightning-fast access – in real-time or near real-time, rich user experience with ready predictive analytics, effortless scalability, and easy deployment.
For the past several years, SingleStore has been working towards transforming the environments that modern applications sit in. All of their research work and innovation have been around expanding the capabilities of these applications from within. Their goal is to guarantee better analytics, flashing-fast access, friction-less scalability, and cost optimization.
We met with Vijay Raja, Sr. Director of Product Marketing to learn how SingleStore is helping enterprises get ahead of the curve.
An Overflowing Architecture
“Companies are carrying a lot of legacy baggage today,” says Mr. Raja.
The modern database ecosystem is a full house of applications, both legacy and modern kinds. A different database for a different use case accumulates to an absurdly large number of applications, making the environment exceedingly complex to navigate, and painfully slow to scale.
With low latency still the expectation no matter what the supporting architecture looks like, the pressure of speed rests squarely on the developers.
“This whole thing is a rather inefficient and complex way to power your applications, because you are managing multiple systems, you’re moving data around, it starts to impact the performance, and you can’t scale fast enough,” told Mr. Raja.
A rich variety of data – real-time, operational, analytics, ML – compels teams to top the existing stack with new sets of analytics engines, machine learning libraries, so on.
One of the biggest hurdles that engineers face with an overcrowded environment is data bottleneck that makes applications frustratingly slow. The slack leaves teams with stale data and slow queries to work with, and users with irresponsive applications. Factor in the cost of moving data around via replication, and you have a system that works more than it needs to, and costs twice than it should.
SingleStoreDB – One Database for Many Use Cases
SingleStoreDB is a silver-bullet to the myriad of problems stemming from such environments. To begin with, it is a single store that is designed for operational analytics. Users can bring in batch, operational and third-party data for quick processing.
With built-in capabilities to process different types of data, SingleStoreDB eliminates the need for different databases and separate analytics engines.
Primarily a relational database, SingleStore says that it is the “world’s fastest real-time distributed SQL database.”
SingleStoreDB is multi-model, that “beyond structural or relational data”, can also handle “JSON data, key value data, time series, geospatial, full text search” and much more. It treats JSON as first-class citizen.
But the real power of SingleStoreDB is not that it’s a transactional database. “We combine transactions and analytics in a single engine and that’s really what makes us unique,” says Mr. Raja.
SingleStoreDB is a performance- first database that delivers low latency analytics on transactional data at scale.
“You no longer need to do ETL (extract, transform and load) between one set of engines to other engines. This makes it incredibly simple, easy, fast and efficient.”
Mr. Raja informed that what’s driving the adoption of SingleStoreDB is not the opportunity to cut out databases, but the ability to “power both applications as well as analytics”, and scale easily.
With no replication involved, data is accessible in a single domain, but placed in different tiers based on the data type. SingleStore offers three tiers of storage – in-memory row store, disk-based column store and cloud-based object store. Data moves fluidly between the tiers offering consistently low-latency access.
“Hot data will probably rest in memory. Warm data is probably on the disk, and the cooler data is probably on the cloud,” says Mr. Raja.
SingleStore is designed for varied use cases – real-time customer analytics, real-time applications, cyber security, fraud analytics, IoT. “We have customers who are bringing time-series data and then doing analytics on this exact same storage engine. It’s just another data type that we process.”
The Inside Technology
SingleStore leverages a patented technology that it calls “Universal Storage.” The secret to SingleStoreDB’s broad compatibility is that it combines both in-memory row-based store of transactional databases, and on-disk column-based store of analytical databases.
“Universal store brings together the best of row and column store into a single table type,” says Mr. Raja.
Analytics can be performed on data as it lands without any movement. The SingleStore engine can process both transactions and analytics on the same table.
Similar to hybrid transaction analytical processing (HTAP) engines, SingleStore sits between the older OLTP applications and OLAP engines. Its key capabilities are unified transactions and analytics in the same engine, and a scale-out architecture optimized for the cloud that allows easy scaling up and out. Others features include ultra-fast data ingestion, low-latency processing, and simple deployment.
In Conclusion
With most organizations still preoccupied with learning how to power data-intensive applications effectively, SingleStoreDB offers a way to nimbly adapt to the changing digital realities. It is a stand-out product because where no one database is good at everything, it is a multi-purpose one that serves numerous use cases. Brownie points for performance gains and cost cuts.
For more information, visit SingleStore’s website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.
