The new general purpose, cloud-based database offering Starlings 1.0 features reduced database administration and the promised absence of partitioning and clustering, as well as cloud-services like vendor-backed performance testing. The database runs in “geo-distributed” environments on clouds operated from different global data centers and operates as would any relational database from an application perspective, according to a NuoDB presentation.
During a Web presentation of the launch that included a live linear scalability presentation, Matt Aslett, research manager and analyst at The 451 Group, said the database market over the last five years has shifted to more NoSQL and “new” SQL innovation to handle the consumption and processing of larger data sets, often in a distributed environment. With NuoDB’s new offering, Aslett said the difference is how data management is conducted from a relational perspective across the cloud.
“We’ve had databases on the cloud for many years, but these are databases of the cloud rather than databases on the cloud,” Aslett said.
NuoDB stated that Starlings 1.0 will be free on the low end of data loads, with increasing license fees as customers scale out. The vendor is moving to expand its partners in response to the release, and on Tuesday also announced a service partner agreement with financial sector vendor NorthPoint Solutions.
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, NuoDB was started in 2008 as NimbusDB by founder and long-time database entrepreneur Jim Starkey, who retired at the end of 2012. In mid-November, NuoDB also made available Release Candidate 1, its elastically scalable Emergent Database for the cloud along with upgrades to the free and commercial versions of its namesake database.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
