As data-driven innovation continues to inform business decisions across every sector, there has been an unprecedented increase in the development of tools that straddle the entirety of a company’s users, which increasingly includes technologies designed to support regular business users with daily data management and analytics tasks.
However, the requirement for specialist tools that simplify and accelerate the productivity of developers and architects is just as pressing. That’s where SingleStore resides. Designed for specialists, SingleStore is a two-fold solution.
A general-purpose, distributed SQL database, SingleStore unifies transactional data and analytics at scale, with incredible performance.
SingleStore is on our Top 10 Shortlist of Data Modernization Enablers.
Who They Are
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, SingleStore’s core goal is to help organizations adapt to shifting business conditions, simplify analytics across diverse data sources, and speed up the development process.
The company has raised $464 million in funding over 11 rounds. Most recently, SingleStore received $30 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and Prosperity7 Ventures. As well as its headquarters in San Francisco, SingleStore has seven other global offices, including hubs in Singapore, Ireland, Portugal, and India.
Raj Verma is SingleStore’s CEO. Verma has 25 years of experience in the enterprise software field. Prior to SingleStore, he helped drive revenue to upwards of $1 billion at TIBCO Software in various roles, including CMO, COO, and executive vice president heading global sales.
SingleStore Co-Founder Adam Prout is the company’s CTO. Before joining Single Store as a co-founding engineer, Prout spearheaded kernel development for Microsoft SQL Server.
What They Do
SingleStoreDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database developed to support data-intensive apps. It handles transactions and analytics through a single platform, ensuring low-latency access to large datasets and making development quicker and more scalable. The core benefit of SingleStore is the speed at which it delivers insights regardless of the size, type, or complexity of the data.
An all-in-one database for cloud and on-prem architectures, SingleStore unifies all of the critical tasks in a developer’s remit, including scalability, consolidation, real-time analytics, fast ingestion, and ease of integration.
SingleStoreDB Cloud is the company’s fully managed cloud service; it’s available on all the major public cloud environments and it’s compatible with the leading data services and software tools, such as Oracle and Tableau. This profile focuses primarily on the attributes of SingleStoreDB Cloud. However, SingleStore also offers a self-managed option.
Users can begin running SingleStore with one-click functionality, while elastic scaling ensures scalability in the cloud. Data ingestion on the platform is simple and optimized for accuracy. Database inputs include MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, Teradata, Redshift, streaming inputs from Apache Kafka and Apache Spark, and storage inputs from Amazon S3 and HDFS.
When it comes to real-time analytics, the platform boasts lightning-fast query responses on live and historical data in ANSI SQL, the popular querying language. Users can perform ad-hoc analytics using BI tools and analyze geographic data in real-time. Recently, SingleStore added a Full-Text Search (FTS) function for fast, relevant results when developing full-text search apps.
SingleStore achieves its lightning-fast performance (it promises 10-100 millisecond performance on queries) through a combination of its proprietary Universal Storage system that supports both transactional and analytical workloads and a distributed architecture. The system suspends clusters when they are not being used and separates storage and computing so users can quickly scale workloads.
Data is highly available thanks to online replication. Security measures including TLS 1.2 encryption, isolated clusters, role-based access controls, and IP whitelisting, ensure data is well-protected.
Wayne Sadin, Acceleration Economy CIO/CDO practitioner analyst and Data Modernization channel host, weighed in on SingleStore’s strengths.
“In today’s Acceleration Economy, CIOs don’t want to buy two database environments— a transactional database & an analytical database—to meet users’ needs for access to historical and real-time information. SingleStore is a cloud-native database that combines the processing power of a transactional database with the flexibility of an analytical database. And it’s built to use the familiar SQL interface, which makes it more approachable to the typical database user.”
Sadin adds: “This is not a tool for the casual user—it’s a powerful and sophisticated product designed to solve big problems: artificial intelligence/machine learning, real-time data ingestion, and enterprise-level data management. If these are your problems, SingleStore can help you solve them.”
Customers SingleStore Has Dazzled
SingleStore boasts an impressive client roster that includes 12 of the Fortune 50, 50% of the top 10 banks, and two of the three top telecommunications companies. One of the major companies SingleStore works with is the technology giant Siemens.
Siemens had built a dashboard system, Siemens Pulse Analytics, that enabled internal and external stakeholders to find and take action on data-driven insights. The end-to-end analytics platform proved popular.
However, the company was struggling with users frustrated by slow response times. Siemens had three core objectives for Pulse when they approached SingleStore:
- Transitioning to the cloud
- Enhancing its capabilities
- Enabling customers to address data insights with their existing BI tools
“We gradually became more and more unhappy with our platform’s performance,” says Christoph Malassa, Managing Consultant/Head of Analytics and Intelligence Solutions, for Siemens in a SingleStore case study. “In the early days, the expectations of our customers were pretty low, because the whole concept of dashboarding was so new. But then the amount of data grew because we kept the history and were adding data every day. So the dashboards became slower and users became less happy.”
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The company chose SingleStore as the solution. Today, Siemens Pulse Analytics is a hybrid containerized app that combines SingleStore, Kubernetes, and AWS. All of the data is stored on SingleStore and uploaded to AWS S3, where Siemens customers can run analytics and MLOPs.
With SingleStore, Siemens experienced:
- 10-100X speed improvements providing them with scope for real-time dashboards
- The ability to query billions of rows and PB of data in under 100ms
- Siemens Pulse Analytics auto-scaling from 500 to 100,000 concurrent users
“With SingleStore, we no longer look at the database as a limiting factor in our business,” says Malassa.
Why SingleStore is a Top 10 Data Modernization Enabler
SingleStore demonstrates the power of performance. Both its roster of leading customers and documented querying speeds are a testament to this. Here are three of the top reasons the company is on our Top 10 Shortlist of Data Modernization enablers, as selected by our practitioner analysts:
- SingleStore is a flexible database that empowers users regardless of which environment they use cloud, on-premise, or hybrid.
- SingleStore addresses every significant pain point that developers experience in the creation and ongoing maintenance of high-volume applications.
- The platform provides real-time results and integrates with major BI and other tools making deployment, performance, and capability monitoring simple and efficient.
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