NuoDB today announced the general availability of the newest version of its NewSQL database. With NuoDB Blackbirds Release 2.0, the company targeted four areas of advancement - increased stability, addressing the challenges of geo-distribution, the need for automation, and a server side programming model.
- Need for Stability. According to Seth Proctor, CTO, NuoDB, the first area of enhancement is around stability in terms of overall SQL coverage. “NuoDB is a NewSQL product. It is a very new architecture and can do a lot of exciting things but first and foremost we want people to really have the experience of a really solid, really mature relational database. That is the focus from performance to core language features to additional management tools we have put into the product. We are really making it seem like a true relational database that has been vetted and that customers can deploy on.”
Overcoming Challenges of Geo-Distribution. The second focus is on the challenges of running a single database in multiple data centers either for high availability or to distribute something geographically in disparate locations to get lower latency to clients that are physically separate, said Proctor. “What we are providing is a database that lets you deploy something that is a single logical database that is always consistent, that is available in multiple locations, and gives you access to your data in a low latency fashion even though the data is always durable and always consistent.”
Automation. The third key area of improvement in NuoDB 2.0 is around automation. “When you start to talk about building systems at this kind of scale and with this kind of complexity, you really need to focus on making the system usable and something that someone who is not distributed systems expert can actually deploy, manage, monitor and know that they are getting what they need out of the software,” said Proctor. “We introduced a new feature in NuoDB 2.0 called templates which provide a way of describing a service level agreement - the problems you are trying to solve and the requirements you have.” The standard out-of-the-box templates are used for configuring the domain of the databases, and then with the Auto Administration enabled, NuoDB will automatically start another database node on a new machine to ensure service level agreements associated with a template is met.
Server Side Programming Model. The database already had support for triggers previously, and in verson 1.2, added support for a SQL language for stored procedures, explained Proctor. With the 2.0 release, NuoDB has expanded on that to allow for arbitrary Java code to be used to program inside the database.
“We have built something that looks very much like the same kind of scale-out model that you would have for say a web container with a Java application inside of it,” said Proctor. “The idea is that we can give people the ability to not just abstract their logic into the database as they would with a traditional stored procedure but give you something where if you would like to invert your model, put some of your application logic inside the database to minimize the number of round trips to the database, and to minimize the latency for doing data queries to take advantage of getting close to your data and closer to your where your queries are running - that is something that we can provide our developers.”
The new release was unveiled in a live web event today that featured NuoDB customer FathomVoice, which provides a VoIP solution for customers that have geographically dispersed offices and employees who travel extensively. FathomVoice needed a single, logical database that could be shared across multiple Amazon AWS servers in different geographies, updated in real-time, and scaled out during peak usage.
For more information about NuoDB 2.0, go here.