Simple, Smart, Scalable, and Still SQL: NuoDB

“Conceived by an innovator, Funded by market leaders, Led by industry veterans, and built by the some of the smartest minds in the business.”

After decades of lethargy and complacency, the past decade has brought with it an explosion in innovation as organizations sought to harness the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Yet the poster child of that innovation - NoSQL - did so by abandoning the simplicity, rigor, and reliability of traditional relational databases.

As software companies increasingly turn to either containers or public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments to support their growth, and increasingly global mobile customer base, they need a database that can support today’s cloud-based, on-demand economy without sacrificing the guarantees that old guard of the relational database provides. And this when NuoDB comes into the frame; NuoDB meets all the demands and much more with a single, logical database running across computers within or across multiple data centers.

A Better Database for Today’s Applications

First envisioned by industry-renowned database architect and innovator, Jim Starkey in 2008, NuoDB was launched in 2010 by Starkey and enterprise software executive, Barry Morris. Fundamental to the founders’ vision was the idea of developing a database that builds on the power of SQL to move relational technology beyond the traditional monolithic databases designed 30 years ago. Today, that vision has re-defined relational database technology to tackle the multiple challenges associated with cloud computing and the rise of global application deployments.

NuoDB is backed by three former CEOs of the four original relational database companies. The company’s senior management team includes former executives from such organizations as BroadVision, Endeca, ExaGrid, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IONA Technologies, Iron Mountain, Microsoft, Object Design, Oracle, Qlik, StreamBase Systems, Teradata, and Veracode.

Since its founding, NuoDB received its first patent in a record 15 months with a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office finding of “no prior art.” 

Elastic SQL: No More Compromise

NuoDB is a technologically advanced, elastic SQL database for cloud and container-based environments. From inception, NuoDB’s architecture was designed to natively deliver five core requirements:

• Scale-out by adding more computers and accommodate gracefully when machines are yanked out
• Never needs to be shut down
• Hardware and software fault tolerant
• Multi-site operation for business continuity
• Automatic load balancing

With NuoDB, one can adjust database size and performance on demand - even across data centers or clouds - without sacrificing data integrity, transactional consistency, or the standards-based SQL interface that the developers already know.

Traditional relational databases were designed for a client-server era, not the distributed, cloud and the container-based environment. NuoDB’s elastic SQL database combines the elastic scale and continuous availability of the cloud with the transactional consistency and durability that databases of record demand. Unlike the monolithic architectures, NuoDB’s patented, distributed approach to database architecture delivers the cost savings, availability, and on-demand scale driving this change while keeping the rich SQL interface and strict transactional consistency databases of record demand.

Under The Hood

NuoDB’s architecture enables the distributed, ACID-compliant database to scale elastically, automate redundancy, simplify disaster recovery, and manage hybrid workloads such as HTAP while meeting performance requirements.

Whether developing a new application or upgrading an existing application, one can experience how database limitations impact development. The inability of traditional monolithic databases to meet today’s elastic scalability and availability requirements has led to imperfect and partial solutions such as sharding, database replication, and non-transactional NoSQL stores.

NuoDB represents a different approach. Rather than bending existing architectures to a breaking point or dismissing the value and ubiquity of standard, transactional SQL, the company takes the design principles of a distributed system – a coordinated, message-based network of nodes that can tolerate both failure and change and combines it with the ACID semantics required of a true SQL system.

Under the hood, NuoDB features the Durable Distributed Cache, a modern architecture built for elastic scale out. In contrast to traditional monolithic databases, it uses separate services for transaction processing and storage management. The two layers, the peer-to-peer architecture enables distributed processing that can be deployed across multiple data centers and is optimized for in-memory speeds, continuous availability, and elastic scale-out.

NuoDB Use Cases

NuoDB is designed to be a general system of record database for enterprise operational workloads, including online transaction processing (OLTP) and hybrid transactional/analytical (HTAP) processing workloads.

Well-suited as a technology for software development organizations that serve a diverse range of industries, NuoDB is built for the modern data center, hybrid cloud environments, and for adaptability to efficiently handle a broad range of transactional workloads. Popular use cases for NuoDB include software services within telecom, financial services, e-commerce, product lifecycle management, and healthcare management industries.

“Migrating to NuoDB saved us a ton of development time and costs compared to migrating to a NoSQL database - while still giving us the elastic SQL functionality we were looking for.”

- Walid Darwish, CTO, CauseSquare

Knowing the Leader

Bob Walmsley is the President and CEO of NuoDB. As a chief executive officer of NuoDB, Bob is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company and growing the business. He focuses on aligning business and technology needs to ensure resources and investments are directed at delivering customer success.

With over 25 years of industry experience, Bob has a track record of building high performing teams and driving operational scalability at rapidly growing software companies. Until recently he was the executive vice president of Sales and Services at NuoDB. Bob provides a wealth of domain expertise in the enterprise software industry, from companies such as Object Design, a leading object database company and Iona Technologies, the leading distributed middleware company in Ireland. Bob has a B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Disk-centric database architectures can’t deliver the capabilities required for modern applications. NuoDB’s DDC-driven architecture naturally supports the needs of today’s cloud applications.”