Michael Stonebraker is well-known in the database business, and for good reasons. He was the computer science professor behind Ingres and Postgres. Eighteen months ago, he started a new company, StreamBase, with another computer science professor, Stan Zdonik, with the goal of speeding access to relational databases. In "Data On The Fly," Forbes.com reports that the company software, also named StreamBase, is reading TCP/IP streams and using asynchronous messaging. Streaming data without storing it on disk as are doing other relational database software gives them a tremendous speed advantage. The company claims it can process 140,000 messages per second on a $1,500 PC, when its competitors can only deal with 900 messages per second. Too good to be true? Read more.
Here are some excerpts from the Forbes article.
"Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow," says Stonebraker, who is chief technology officer at Streambase, a 25-person outfit based in Lexington, Mass. "Big customers have already tried to use relational databases for streaming data and dismissed them. Those products are non-starters in this market."
In a recent pilot program, Streambase was able to analyze 140,000 messages per second, while a leading relational database -- Stonebraker won't say which one -- could handle only 900 messages per second. Streambase has 12 customers now testing its software, all of them financial services companies that need to analyze rapid-fire ticker feeds and other streaming data.
Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows. Traditional systems bog down because they first store data on hard drives or in main memory and then query it, Stonebraker says.
The software, which should be commercially available next month, runs on Linux and Solaris, but a Microsoft version should be available soon.
The database business is not a cheap one. So how much this new company will charge for a -- largely -- unproven software?
Streambase charges customers annual subscriptions for its software, setting prices based on how many CPUs a customer uses to power the software. Typical deals so far have ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 a year, says Barry Morris, Streambase's chief executive.
The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.
—Albert Borgman, U. S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)
In "StreamBase eyes real-time streaming apps," InfoWorld wrote the prices shoud be lower.
The software is available via a subscription model, with pricing in the range of approximately $50,000 per year, Stonebraker said. Subscriptions are sold on a per-CPU basis.
Who will be the customers for these speedy accesses to their databases? Let's come back to Forbes.com.
For now Streambase is focusing attention on financial services companies, which hope to do things like track how well traders are performing on a real-time basis, rather than aggregating trades at the end of the day and analyzing them overnight.
A bigger opportunity involves processing real-time data feeds generated by sensor networks and RFID tags. A military contractor wants to use Streambase to keep track of soldiers and vehicles in the battlefield. A casino in Las Vegas is considering using Streambase to track the performance of individual gamblers.
In an interview with InfoWorld, Stonebraker gave more details about military applications.
We did a prototype that dealt with army battalion monitoring. When an army battalion is 30,000 humans and 12,000 vehicles, the army is deadly serious about getting a vital signs monitor on every one of the humans so they can do combat medical triage or [take other actions]. They already have a GPS system in every vehicle, but that didn't keep Jennifer Lynch's convoy from getting lost.
They want to turn this into a system to watch the position of every vehicle and compare it against where you're supposed to be. They also want to put a sensor on the gun turret. Together with position, that allows you to detect crossfire which is a big problem in Iraq. [Also,] they want to put a monitor on the gas gauge and figure out do you have enough fuel to accomplish your mission. It's this style of application which is large amounts of real-time data with real-time actions to take.
Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that have their ultimate origin in Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle, knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism, respectively, formed the major intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth century, the twin poles of epistemology.
—Morris Berman (b. 1914)
All these numbers, and some pages on the company website are all rosy, but if you want to read a whitepaper or some benchmarks, you need to register -- and to be accepted. I'm not sure if it's a good way to find new customers. But, after all, the company only plans to do some business next month.
If you know solid numbers about this company's claims, please let me know.
Sources: Daniel Lyons, Forbes.com, January 18, 2005; Paul Krill, InfoWorld, January 7 and 11, 2005; and StreamBase website
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Databases
IT
Software
Military Applications.