Starcounter, based in Stockholm, Sweden, has announced its patent-pending VMDBMS technology, which the company says is designed to improve database performance.
According to the company, the key features of Starcounter is that it is a general-purpose transactional database (OLTP), ACID-compliant, memory-centric, object database, with SQL support.
Suited for highly transactional applications, including e-commerce and ERP, the VMDBMS is said to provide the scalability and flexibility necessary for large-scale real-time applications.
"The company has been around since 2006 but we still don't have a product that is public. What we are launching now is this technology platform, the VMDBMS, that we built the database on - but during this time we actually have had ISVs under NDA that have built applications on top of Starcounter. Those are primarily withhin the internet, e-commerce industries, we also have one within retail, for example, but we also expect to see traction within telecom, banking and finance because those are high-transactional application environments so we think they are going to see the most benefit from really fast databases," Åsa Holmström, CEO of Starcounter, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The next step for the company is to announce a public beta of the product which will come this summer, she adds.
According to Peter Idestam-Almquist, CTO of Starcounter, VMDBMS is more than 100 times faster than traditional market-leading databases and 10 times faster than high performance databases. As the name implies, the technology integrates the virtual machine and the database management system.
"We are focusing on high transactional throughput for modern applications with enormous amounts of users so in some sense we are targeting the same problems as other solutions with NoSQL databases but in contrast we support transactional security with ACID compliance as traditional databases and we also support SQL as traditional databases do," says Idestam-Almquist.
Because data is physically stored only in one place, the VMDBMS eliminates data transfers between application and the database as well as transformation between different data formats. This is possible because the application can access data in the database as fast as its internal temporary data. "The data is never moved, the data always resides in the database all the time, and application directly accesses the data managed by the database management system. There is no copy whatsoever of the data local to the application," says Idestam-Almquist.
More information is available at http://www.starcounter.com.