NuoDB, Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, has announced the release of Beta 7 of its web-scale database. The company says the new release provides five times the scalability of the previous version (50 nodes) among other new features. NuoDB takes a shared nothing, asynchronous, peer-to-peer approach that the company says is ideal for the cloud, while also delivering the power, reliability and functionality of a traditional database. The database is planned to be generally available in Q3 2012.
The NuoDB database is SQL-compliant, resilient, requires minimal administration, guarantees the integrity of transactions and delivers high performance at web-scale with highly efficient and flexible resource utilization, the company says.
According to Barry Morris, CEO of NuoDB, who co-founded the company with Jim Starkey, in addition to NuoDB being a full SQL database it can also do anything that a NoSQL database can do. “But unlike the NoSQL databases, we have not lowered the bar in terms of the services we provide. We provide full SQL query services and full transactional guarantees which means consistent reliable data.” The NuoDB Beta 7 is part of a complete “re-think” of relational databases, and has strong appeal to organizations with unpredictable web loads, says Morris.
The latest beta release includes several key new features that incorporate developer feedback in key product areas. In performance and scalability enhancements, Beta 7 now supports up to 50 nodes enabling the database to elastically scale to tens of thousands of transactions per second on Amazon EC2 or local commodity servers. Beta 7 provides additional hardening and increased stability and also now supports SQL 92 with 99 extensions as well as incorporating several querying and indexing enhancements and enhances SQL Standards compliance to cover a majority of application requirements. In addition, this version provides enhancements to the graphical console, which was introduced in Beta 6, as well as new language drivers, including new Ruby, PHP/PDO, and Perl drivers, to address growing web development needs. These drivers were developed by the NuoDB Github community.
“When NuoDB becomes generally available later this year, we expect there will be no other database architecture capable of supporting web-scale applications as efficiently or at similar scale. This not only includes traditional relational databases, but also any of the current NoSQL or NewSQL offerings. While Beta 7 supports 50 nodes now, future releases will scale out even further,” adds Morris.
Comparing the architecture to a flock of birds, Morris says, a flock of birds can take off together and land together, but there is no central brain and there is no bird in charge. “It is a system that is about the coordination of peers and so it is a peer to peer kind of model with distributed control." That is the breakthrough in NuoDB, he notes.
The NuoDB Beta 7 software is available immediately on Windows, MacOS, and Linux platforms and can be downloaded for free at www.nuodb.com/download.php.