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Hadoop Integration Highlights Updates to Aerospike, "World's Fastest Database'

• By David Ramel
• 12/16/2014

Aerospike Inc., maker of what it claims to be the "world's fastest database," has announced upgrades to its NoSQL key-value pair database.

Heading the list of improvements is better integration with Hadoop, the Big Data analytics mainstay software framework. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also cited storage and performance improvements and easier installation and deployment.

With improved Hadoop integration, the company said, "Hadoop Split and Query support Aerospike's patented Indexed MapReduce capability so Hadoop jobs can operate on a targeted subset of data in Aerospike, instead of the typical [Hadoop Distributed File System] HDFS pattern of analyzing large data lakes. For some uses, this results in 100 times performance gains."

The movement of data between HDFS and Aerospike databases was also enhanced. InputFormat integration lets Hadoop tools analyze data in Aerospike databases without the need to extract the data to the HDFS, while on the OutputFormat side, petabyte-scale Hadoop job results can be injected immediately into Aerospike.

"With the availability of powerful new clients, easier installation and deployment, storage and performance improvements, enterprise security enhancements, Hadoop integration and numerous community contributions, Aerospike continues to meet and exceed developers' current and future needs," the company said in a statement.

Aerospike offers on GitHub the open source code for its server and client libraries for the top programming languages. It also offers a community edition management console.

With in-memory technology, flash storage optimization and more, Aerospike lays claim to the title of the "world's fastest database" for its key-value store database and provides benchmarks to back that claim, which might be disputed by the likes of Exasol AG, MemSQL and others.

The company has been cited by research firms such as Gartner, Forrester, 451 Research and Wikibon.

"There is enormous potential for today's businesses to harness the power of Big Data with real-time applications, but the challenge is finding breakthrough database technologies that aren't confined by traditional designs," the company quoted Wikibon exec David Floyer as saying. "Aerospike's next-generation NoSQL database brings price and performance to new levels, fueling disruptive and transformative new applications."

Besides the improved Hadoop integration, new enhancements to the database system of special interest to developers include updates for the existing Java, Node.js, .NET/C#, and C client libraries, along with new Python, PHP and Go clients and a new Ruby client in beta. Aerospike also thought developers would benefit from "The ability to set consistency on a per-transaction basis to support multiple applications and ensure applications that tolerate eventual consistency can benefit from lower latency."

Deployment options are increased via Docker containers and Vagrant images, along with a new Google Click-to-Deploy option that "expedites creation of a two-node Aerospike cluster on Google Cloud Platform."

Under storage and performance enhancements, the company listed a new disk write cache, jemalloc memory allocation system, hot-swap SSD storage capability and other technology updates, along with improvements to enterprise security.

"Aerospike continues to blaze the way with innovations to its NoSQL database technology far outpacing competitors," said Brian Bulkowski, co-founder and CTO. "Both disruptive startups and established enterprises choose Aerospike to power a new class of real-time, data-driven applications that aren't technically or economically feasible with other database technologies."