ScaleDB presents The Revenge of the Pointer
April 13th, 2008 Curt MonashThe MySQL user conference is upon us, and hence so are MySQL-related product announcements, including storage engines. One such is Kickfire. ScaleDB — smaller and earlier-stage — is another.
In a nutshell, ScaleDB’s proposition is:
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Innovative approach to indexing relational DBMS, providing performance advantages.
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Shared-everything scale-up that ScaleDB believes will leapfrog the MySQL engine competition already in Release 1. (In my opinion, this is the least plausible part of the ScaleDB story.)
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State-of-the-art me-too facilities for locking, logging, replication/fail-over, etc., also already in Release 1.
Like many software companies with non-US roots, ScaleDB seems to have started with a single custom project, using a Patricia trie indexing system. Then they decided Patricia tries might be really useful for relational OLTP as well. The ScaleDB team now features four developers, plus half-time or so “Chief Architect” involvement from Vern Watts. Watts seems to pretty much have been Mr. IMS for the past four decades, and thus surely knows a whole lot about pointer-based database management systems; presumably, he’s responsible for the generic DBMS design features that are being added to the innovative indexing scheme. On ScaleDB’s advisory board is PeopleSoft veteran Rick Berquist, about whom I’ve had fond thoughts ever since he talked me into focusing on consulting as the core of my business.*
*More precisely, Rick pretty much tricked me into doing a day of consulting for $15K, then revealed that’s what he’d done, expressing the thought that he’d very much gotten his money’s worth. But I digress …
ScaleDB has no customers to date, but hopes to be in beta by the end of this year. Angels and a small VC firm have provided bridge loans; otherwise, ScaleDB has no outside investment. ScaleDB’s business model thoughts include: