The Coolest Database System Companies Of The 2020 Big Data 100

Part 3 of CRN’s Big Data 100 looks at the vendors solution providers need to know in the database software space.

Running The Bases

By 2025 the “global datasphere,” the total amount of digital data in the world, is expected to reach 175 zettabytes – up more than five-fold from just 33 zettabytes in 2018, according to market researcher IDC.

Businesses and organizations are increasingly challenged to handle the huge volumes of data, both internally generated and acquired from outside sources, that they need to process, store and analyze in order to be competitive.

Database management software remains one of the most critical technologies that businesses and organizations need in their big data technology arsenal.

As part of the 2020 Big Data 100, we’ve put together a list of database system companies – from established vendors to those in startup mode – that solution providers should be aware of. They offer everything from SQL relational database software to next-generation NoSQL, graph and time-series database systems – all designed to help business and organizations manage the deluge of structured and unstructured data they face today.

This week CRN is running the Big Data 100 list in slide shows with vendors of business analytics software, big data systems and platforms, database systems, data management and integration tools, and data science and machine learning tools.

(Some vendors offer big data products that span multiple technology categories: They appear in the slideshow for the technology segment in which they are most prominent.)

Couchbase

Top Executive: CEO Matt Cain

Couchbase, based in Santa Clara, Calif., develops a distributed, document-oriented NoSQL database designed for interactive web applications. The company’s product lineup includes the Couchbase Server and Couchbase Mobile for extending the database’s functionality to mobile devices. Customers include American Express, Marriott, LinkedIn and Verizon.

In February Couchbase debuted Couchbase Cloud, a fully managed Database-as-a-Service. Couchbase Cloud will allow businesses and organizations to host their data within their own virtual private cloud for greater control and ownership while only paying for the capacity they use. The system is currently in beta and will be available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure this summer.

DataStax

Top Executive: Chet Kapoor

DataStax offers a scale-out NoSQL database built on the Apache Cassandra open-source database system. DataStax Enterprise, the company’s flagship distribution of Apache Cassandra, includes graph, analytics, in-memory, search and Kafka capabilities with a unified security model. Astra is DataStax’s cloud-native Database-as-a-Service offering.

On April 7 DataStax, based in Santa Clara, Calif., announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 6.8 with new capabilities for enterprises to advance bare-metal performance and support more workloads. The new release also enables data sharing between Kubernetes containers for data managed by DSE.

EnterpriseDB

Top Executive: CEO Ed Boyajian

EnterpriseDB provides software, services and support, including its EDB Postgres Platform, based on the PostgreSQL open-source database system. The company’s EDB Postgres Advanced Server, a component of its platform, provides native database compatibility with Oracle’s relational database.

EnterpriseDB, based in Bedford, Mass., recently reported its 40th consecutive quarter of subscription growth, including 61 percent growth in recurring revenue. And in February the company inked a multi-year deal with IBM under which that company will sell the EDB Postgres Platform.

Exasol

Top Executive: CEO Aaron Auld

Exasol develops a high-performance, in-memory analytics database management system that’s designed for high-performance data analysis tasks.

A new release of the database that debuted in December included a cloud deployment and configuration wizard to make it easier to deploy, configure and operate the database on AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. The 6.2 release also offered row-level security and a Spark connector.

Exasol is based in Nuremberg, Germany.

InfluxData

Top Executive: Evan Kaplan

InfluxData markets the InfluxDB time-series database, along with the InfluxDB Enterprise platform that incorporates the database and InfluxDB Cloud. Time-series databases are designed to store and retrieve data that is timestamped to provide critical context to the data points. While once largely used for financial trading applications, time-series databases are becoming more widely used for a range of tasks in which the time dimension of data is important.

InfluxData, based in San Francisco, lists Visa, Airbus and NASA among its customers. In February the company announced the availability of its database on the Google Cloud Platform.

MariaDB

Top Executive: CEO Michael Howard

MariaDB is a community-developed, commercial fork of the popular MySQL relational database. MariaDB was founded in 2010 by one of MySQL’s original developers because of concern about MySQL’s future as an open-source database after the database technology was acquired by Oracle.

On March 31 the MariaDB corporation, based in Redwood City, Calif. and Helsinki, Finland, debuted MariaDB SkySQL, a cloud-native Database-as-a-Service for both transaction processing and business analytics applications. The company also announced that SkySQL was available on the Google Cloud Platform.

MarkLogic

Top Executive: CEO Gary Bloom

MarkLogic offers a data management and integration system, the MarkLogic Data Hub Platform, based on the MarkLogic multi-model NoSQL database that can handle documents, graphs and relational data for transactional and analytical tasks.

MarkLogic, based in San Carlos, Calif., touts its database as the most secure NoSQL database on the market with its Common Criteria Security certification and granular security controls.

MemSQL

Top Executive: CEO Nikita Shamgunov

MemSQL developed its namesake distributed, highly scalable database for cloud and on-premises applications. The “No-Limits” relational database supports standard ANSI SQL and boasts high-speed query processing and data ingestion for both transactional and analytical tasks.

San Francisco-based MemSQL recently launched a gutsy marketing campaign – including “Dump Oracle” billboards in the Bay Area – urging businesses to ditch their Oracle database products in favor of MemSQL’s software.

MongoDB

Top Executive: CEO Dev Ittycheria

MongoDB is a leading player in the market for NoSQL databases with its namesake distributed, document-oriented database software for running modern applications.

A key part of the company’s product lineup is MongoDB Atlas, the company’s cloud database that’s offered as a fully managed service on AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform.

MongoDB is based in New York City.

Neo4j

Top Executive: CEO Emil Eifrem

Neo4j markets a graph database system – graph databases are designed to store not just data, but also the relationships between data and treat the relationships as important as the data itself. Designed to work with highly connected data, graph databases are best for analyzing data relationships for such tasks as relationship marketing and fraud detection.

In February the San Mateo, Calif.-based company released Neo4j 4.0 with unlimited scalability and intelligent data context features. Earlier this month it debuted Neo4j for Graph Data Science.

Redis Labs

Top Executive: CEO Ofer Bengal

Redis develops a high-performance, in-memory database system for a range of e-commerce, personalization, search, IoT, social, machine learning and metering applications. The company, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., markets the commercial Redis Enterprise edition of the database and offers an open-source edition.

Rockset

Top Executive: CEO Venkat Venkataramani

Rockset offers a serverless, real-time search and analytics database system for developing and running applications that make decisions using real-time data – an alternative to traditional batch-oriented analytical database technologies. The database stores and indexes real-time data from transactional systems and event streams using schema-free JSON documents and declarative SQL over REST interfaces.

In March the San Mateo, Calif. company released its new Query Lambdas capability that runs developer queries in response to events, enabling developers to build data applications faster.

Splice Machine

Top Executive: CEO Monte Zweben

Splice Machine offers a scale-out, distributed SQL relational database that’s targeted for modernizing applications running on legacy database systems and migrating them to a platform that can handles today’s increased transactional and analytical data workloads. The system offers in-memory analytics and in-database machine learning and supports ACID transactions.

In January Splice Machine, headquartered in San Francisco, launched the 3.0 version of the data platform with a new Kubernetes managed service, a new version of the ML Manager machine learning software, new replication and disaster recovery capabilities, time travel features and legacy database compatibility.

SQream

Top Executive: CEO Ami Gal

SQream DB is a SQL database designed to analyze huge volumes of data in data warehouse systems built to run on GPU processors. One of several GPU databases that have hit the market in recent years, SQream DB uses advanced columnar technology to significantly speed up data loading and analysis, processing the most complex queries while supporting petabytes of data and trillions of records.

SQream DB v2020.1, launched in January, focused on rapid integration with Hadoop systems through native support for the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), improved AWS S3 connectivity, enhanced analytics and direct queries of massive data through a new DB-API Python driver.

SQream is based in New York City.

Timescale

Top Executive: CEO Ajay Kulkarni

Timescale develops the TimescaleDB open-source SQL database, built on the PostgreSQL database, for storing and analyzing time-series and IoT data. In June 2019 the New York-based company debuted Timescale Cloud, a cloud-based, fully managed cloud database service running on AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform.

Timescale just released TimescaleDB 1.7 with PostgreSQL 12 support and real-time aggregates functionality.