Clustrix Brings Real-Time Analytics and Scale-Out SQL to Cloud Applications

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To address the traditional limits and problems of SQL at scale, we are thrilled to announce our integration of ClustrixDB on to Joyent's cloud platform. The partnership enables us to broaden our reach and continue to help fast-growing companies focus their valuable development resources on adding application features while limiting the time spent on database management—because we’ve automated as much of that as possible in ClustrixDB.

Now Joyent and Clustrix customers will be able develop and deploy applications at massive scale in the Joyent cloud with ClustrixDB, which currently provides a resilient foundation for our existing customers’ applications, some with upwards of several million concurrent users processing billions of transactions per day.

And when they need to grow their apps, they will now be able to quickly scale their SQL database tier with ClustrixDB - by simply spinning up new Joyent VMs from a public ClustrixDB image and dynamically adding them to their cluster and updating their license key on-line with just a few quick clicks in our Insight management GUI - without disruption to users or their running applications. Oh, did I forget to mention on-line schema changes and MVCC are standard features?

Why ClustrixDB?

ClustrixDB has been engineered for the cloud is uniquely and ideally suited to handle massive volumes of ACID-compliant transactional workloads while concurrently running real-time analytics on the same operational data. Check out this web page for more details.

Outside the scope of this introductory post we encourage you to “lift the hood” on ClustrixDB to learn about the key concepts and capabilities of its fully-distributed shared-nothing architecture.

We’ve noted that when new applications become successful and very popular they typically experience rapid user adoption and growth rates. Then developers must scramble to add new features so their apps continue to appeal to newly-engaged users. And also to maintain delivery of service of them with the low-latency and responsiveness needed to sustain users’ interest.

To prevent downtime or poor performance, which can cause the company to lose additional growth opportunities, these applications require scale-out capabilities with fault-tolerance, across all tiers, from front to back, and where capacity can be easily added, inexpensively and incrementally. All without disruption to users and the running applications. However, for applications requiring a transactional SQL backend, or Model for MVC environments, these capabilities have been greatly lacking to being completely AWOL.

So much so that the only apparent choices for some developers has been to fracture their database, by sharding it across several independent DB instances. Then they must deal with the loss of transactional integrity and powerful relational operators and logic needed for complex joins and aggregates across the expanse of their data.

Or, they rewrite their code in such a way to implement these powerful SQL capabilities back up in the app itself, sacrificing them from the DB itself on the “altar of scale” in favor of a less capable NoSQL database to get the scale they need.

We think either of these choices are really inefficient at best, and completely wasteful of valuable development resources at worst. Resources that could be better focused and spent on adding value to the applications themselves instead of being forced to fool with data storage infrastructure which isn’t their primary focus.

Eliminating both of these disadvantages is what ClustrixDB is all about. We’re giving developers a new, better and easier way that allows existing MySQL applications to function at massive web-scale with minimal to zero change, all while leveraging existing expertise at maximum productivity.

In summary, ClustrixDB allows enterprises to perform complex real-time analytics within seconds on their live operational data. And doing so while tracking and measuring performance, and providing visualization of query efficiency and resource utilization in the Insight management interface. But more on all of these valuable capabilities and tools in another blog post.

Learn more about ClustrixDB’s integration with Joyent here.



Post written by Rollie Schmidt, Clustrix