8 Announcements from 8Kdata

 April 11, 2016

Today is one of those days that mark the history and the future of a startup. At least, that’s what we feel. Too many good news that we want to announce, make public and share with you:

#1. We have acquired Otogami!

Otogami is one of the most renowned startups in the Spanish IT sector. Led by tech gurus David Bonilla and Jerónimo López, this acqui-hiring brings the -much needed- productization and marketing capabilities that 8Kdata and ToroDB need. The whole Otogami staff is now part of 8Kdata’s amazing team.

8kdata-family

#2. We are still on the game!

The two product lines developed and run by Otogami (Otogami itself and Runnics) will continue operating as usual. While departing from 8Kdata’s products and area of expertise, we don’t have any plans to shut them down. No worries!

#3. We have a new office!

To cope with our current team, and our projected growth, we recently moved to Alcobendas (Madrid, Spain), the 3rd largest Spanish city in terms of foreign multinational corporations. Our new Toroplex is a large, cool, modern loft, with two terraces to sun tan while programming 🙂 Our offices are open for you to visit us any time!

#4. Better late than never. We finally have a (new) website!

Even more importantly, now ToroDB has a new home. It will be augmented soon, with more information, documentation and all that you can expect from a database that will reach GA at the end of this year. There’s also dedicated pages to the range of our PostgreSQL’s Professional Services: support, consulting and training.

#5. New Bull on the Block!

Speaking of ToroDB and the roadmap, The next version v0.40 will be out this Q2 2016, and will bring to the table replication support for the MongoDB protocol (as a secondary node) and the Greenplum open source database as a backend, plus significant, really significant, performance improvements. Check it out on our GitHub public repo!

#6. We will be at Percona Live 2016!

If you want to know more about ToroDB, and happen to be in Silicon Valley next week, our CEO Álvaro Hernández will be speaking at the Percona Live 2016 conference about “ToroDB: Supercharging your RDBMS with MongoDB Superpowers”. It’s really cool that we received this invitation, given that we are, initially, a database based on Postgres or Postgres-derived backends!
Hint: maybe, and only maybe, there’s also something about My in that talk 😉

#7. New investors onboard!

Previous Otogami’s investors have joined us. A bunch of well-known Spanish Business Angels and the VC fund Vitamina K are among them. Welcome, and thank you for your trust and support.

#8. One more thing…

Today we’re also announcing Big Toro. Big Toro is a ToroDB-derived product that aims to enable analytics for NoSQL. What do we mean by enabling? Most, if not all, of NoSQL databases, have a hard time doing analytics: they lack native SQL support; and more importantly, they really struggle when doing aggregated queries, due to the unstructured nature of NoSQL.

BigToro, like ToroDB, creates automatic SCHEMAs for you, out of the NoSQL documents, that are replicated in real-time from a MongoDB replica set (no need to ETL!). Then you can use native SQL to make your analytic queries, on top of an analytics database, like Greenplum or CitusDB. Big Toro GA will be announced later this year but the current version is already 100x faster than other solutions.

SELECT what, why FROM “8Kdata”;

 April 8, 2016
what why

If anything, we are a group of passionate developers and database enthusiasts.

8Kdata is a database R&D company, aka we-love-databases-and-we-come-up-with-geeky-projects-about-them. Cool thing is that some of those geeky projects end up being serious products that will hopefully revolutionize our industry in one way or another.

We are (and started as) a PostgreSQL company. We love Postgres since we first knew about it, circa year 2,000. Postgres is the most advanced open source database –that’s the motto. And it deserves a companion of high quality Professional Services. That’s what we strive to offer, be it consulting services, support or training.

Back to the products. After researching whether it was possible to create a billion tables in a database, we started ToroDB. ToroDB is the first database that is both NoSQL and SQL at the same time. It speaks the MongoDB wire protocol, so you can use your MongoDB drivers, tools and programs; but data will be transformed into relations and stored in a PostgreSQL database. Which you could query with either the MongoDB API or pure, native SQL.

Then there’s also BigToro (coming soon!), a ToroDB’s offspring. BigToro wants to really enable Data Analytics for NoSQL. The initial advantages of unstructured data turn to really poor results on aggregated queries, the ones used in analytics. By an automatic process, BigToro replicates from a MongoDB cluster, structures data in relational tables, and stores it in PostgreSQL or shards it into analytics/warehousing databases (like Greenplum or CitusDb) to speedup aggregated queries, performed in SQL.

As we completely believe in open source, both ToroDB and BigToro are open source. Fully. We don’t do “open core” and then “enterprise” proprietary software. We’re fully committed to open source and all what we do is open source. Forever.

Since the introduction of the NoSQL databases, users need to choose between either a NoSQL database or a relational one. The NoSQL databases are meant to provide agility and scalability, at the cost of trading either durability, consistency and/or good query capabilities. The relational databases specialize in durability and consistency, but are harder to scale and shard.

Wouldn’t it be possible to have both the benefits of the NoSQL and the relational databases in the same place? This is one of the questions that we repeatedly asked to ourselves.

It’s surprising the number of NoSQL databases that have appeared in the last years. What’s even more surprising, at least for us, is that they both started from scratch and have their own API/protocol. Isn’t that a lot of re-inventing the wheel? In our opinion, it is.

So we asked ourselves a second question: is it possible to create a NoSQL database, without throwing away the experience and know-how acquired by the relational databases during the last 3-4 decades? Is it possible to construct such a NoSQL database based on a relational database, that would also be compatible with existing APIs/languages?

Our answer is, of course, ToroDB.

We believe there is room to create better databases. That despite the myths of relational databases being slow, RDBMSs have proven to be really fast and are software that you can really trust. We believe that in order to have NoSQL you don’t have to sacrifice transactions, strong isolation and consistency semantics and, of course, you don’t have to sacrifice SQL, the lingua franca of data querying.

We also strongly believe that databases have to be fully open source. After all the NSA and spying scandals, no organization (big or small, but specially Governments) should store their data on some software which may be sending data or opening backdoors to spying agencies or other third parties. The only viable alternative is open source.

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