Name any enterprise application today, and it's a pretty safe bet that it's deployed on a relational database management system. Since the 1980s, RDBMS technology has been the go-to solution for storing and retrieving information about almost anything, from finances to widgets to people. Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) are among the companies leading the way; SAP and Teradata (TDC) are also competitors.

    Then big data came along. Newly exploding volumes of data made the limits of existing RDMBSes painfully clear. "Buyers now want, and expect, immediate answers to questions that previously may have taken companies minutes, hours, days to answer," said Bruce Cleveland, a general partner with InterWest Partners.

    In a consumer-facing business, a buyer may want to know, "Is it in stock?" In a B2B business, the buyer may want to know, "What is your best price?" And they want to know immediately. "With data volumes increasing, companies have had two poor options: Either live with sub-optimal performance or 'scale up' their traditional databases using extremely expensive hardware," Cleveland added.

    That's where Splice Machine comes in. Much the way IBM recently announced a "scale out" storage offering that allows large companies to scale capabilities without massive investments, so Splice Machine aims to do the same thing for large databases.

'The best of both worlds'

    An alternative to today's RDBMSes, Splice Machine effectively combines traditional relational database technology with the scale-out capabilities of Hadoop, the de facto standard for big data architecture at Yahoo (YHOO), Facebook (FB), and most other major companies. Whereas Hadoop is best known for its power to perform batch analytics, Splice Machine focuses instead on operational applications and real-time analytics.

    "Splice Machine is aiming to turn the common wisdom on its head with a solution that combines the best of both worlds: The cost-effective, scale-out performance of Hadoop and compatibility with common RDBMS/SQL processes -- such as data cleansing, customer roll-ups and ETL work -- and applications like Cognos, Unica, SAS and SPSS," Charles King, a principal analyst withPund-IT, said.

    Splice Machine's aim is to convince businesses to replace traditional databases such as MySQL and Oracle with their own, Cleveland said, with promises of high performance, accuracy, and reliability.

    "[Businesses] get high performance from scaling out onto clusters of inexpensive servers," he said. "And because Splice Machine supports native SQL, companies can do this without having to rewrite their applications."

'Scalability nobody has been addressing'

    Last week, Splice Machine -- which was founded two years ago and is backed by $19 million in funding from InterWest Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures -- launched its Hadoop-based database into public beta. Fifteen companies already use the technology, including the San Antonio, Texas-based marketing services company Harte Hanks. Splice Machine said Harte Hanks observed improvement to the ratio of price to performance by more than 10x compared with its existing Oracle RAC databases. (Splice Machine offers the standalone version of its database on a freemium basis for testing; otherwise, it's $5,000 per node.)

    "We think this will disrupt the $21 billion database market," Monte Zweben, Splice Machine's co-founder and chief executive, told Fortune. (Gartner estimates the market to be worth $26 billion and growing at nine percent annually.)

    可以肯定的是，如今不管哪款企业级应用，一定都会用到关系型数据库管理系统（RDBMS）。自从20世纪80年代以来，无论信息类型是关于金融、小插件，还是人员，RDBMS就一直是存储及恢复几乎所有类型信息的首选方案。甲骨文公司（Oracle）、IBM公司和微软公司（Microsoft）无疑是业界翘楚，SAP公司和天睿公司（Teradata）也是强劲的竞争者。

    随后大数据横空出世。爆炸式增长的海量新数据使目前RDBMS的局限一目了然，也着实恼人。风投公司InterWest Partners普通合伙人布鲁斯•克利夫兰称：“以前企业可能花上几分钟、几小时、甚至好几天来回答客户的问题，但今天，客户希望立即马上就有答复。”

    在面向消费者的行业里，客户可能想了解“有现货吗？”而在B2B行业里，客户可能想知道“最优惠的价格是多少？”而且他们希望马上就能获得答案。对此克利夫兰补充称：“随着数据量的猛增，企业现在只有两个次优选择：要么维持欠佳的业绩，要么用极其昂贵的硬件‘升级’传统数据库。”

    Splice Machine正是抓住了这一契机。就像IBM公司最近宣布要“向外扩展”存储产品，让大公司无需巨额投资也能升级存储能力一样，Splice Machine也瞄准了大型数据库提供类似服务。

两全其美的方案

    作为目前RDBMS的替代方案，Splice Machine有效地将传统关系型数据技术与Hadoop向外扩展的能力相结合，而后者实际上正是雅虎公司（Yahoo）、Facebook公司及其他大企业大数据架构的标准。尽管Hadoop以执行批量分析而著称，但Splice Machine主攻的却是业务应用和实时分析。

    咨询公司Pund-IT首席分析师查尔斯•金称：“Splice Machine的目标是颠覆传统观念，提供一种充分结合两大领域优势的解决方案，也就是：Hadoop的经济实惠、向外扩展的性能，及其与通用RDBMS/SQL操作——如数据清理、客户上卷和提取转换加载（ETL）——以及像Cognos, Unica, SAS和SPSS这类应用的良好兼容性。”

    克利夫兰表示，Splice Machine的目标是，凭借高效能、精确性和可靠性等承诺，说服企业客户用他们的产品替换掉MySQL和Oracle这类传统数据库。

    他说：“（企业）可以通过将数据向外扩展到相对廉价的服务器集群中获得高效能。同时，由于Splice Machine支持原生结构化查询语言（SQL），企业可以无须重写应用就能实现这一点。”

“前所未有的可扩展性”

    Splice Machine创立于两年前，获得了来自InterWest和Mohr Davidow Ventures两家公司共计1900万美元的投资。上周，Splice Machine发布了基于Hadoop的公测版数据库。已有15家公司采用了这项技术，包括德克萨斯州圣安东尼奥的营销服务公司Harte Hanks。Splice Machine称，Harte Hanks发现与其现有的Oracle RAC数据库相比，系统的性价比提高了十倍多（Splice Machine提供的用于测试的标准版数据库免费；否则每个节点收费5,000美元）。

    Splice Machine联合创始人兼首席执行官蒙特•兹魏本告诉《财富》杂志（Fortune）：“我们认为这款产品将颠覆价值210亿美元的数据库市场。”【高德纳公司（Gartner）则估计该市场价值为260亿美元，年增长率为9%】。

    Previously, Zweben worked at the NASA Ames Research Center; he also founded Blue Martini Software.

    "The majority of competitors that are trying to apply this scale-out technology are focused on analytical apps," Zweben said. "What we think may be more valuable is powering real-time apps, where a concurrent set of users are reading and writing to the database at the same time. That's scalability nobody has been addressing, and that's what we do."

'A category-disruptive company'

    In many ways, Splice Machine democratizes what huge companies "with 50 Ph.Ds and countless Java programmers" can do, said Bill Ericson, a general partner at Mohr Davidow, which participated in the company's Series A and Series B financing rounds.

    "One of the problems with these data-intensive technologies is, they work great if you have really smart Ph.Ds but the average enterprise has limited resources," Ericson said. With Splice Machine, "the costs are probably 10 to 25 percent of trying to do this with something like Oracle. Users don't have to buy all new software and all new tools, and not only do they save on the fundamental infrastructure, but they don't have to throw out the window everything they built over the last 25 years."

    Splice Machine's model "dramatically changes the economics of scaling databases," Cleveland said. "One of Splice Machine's customers had their queries speed up by three to seven times while reducing costs by over 75% compared to their current database solution."

    For InterWest Partners -- which participated in Splice Machine's Series B -- the company is "an example of investing in what we believe could be a category-disruptive company," he added. "Since Splice Machine supports standard SQL, it has the potential to replace -- disrupt -- the traditional database suppliers by offering a low-cost, high-performance, scale-out database solution without companies having to rewrite their existing applications, which is what the NoSQL and NewSQL companies require in order to use their solutions. With Splice Machine, the same programmers who wrote the existing SQL applications can easily and simply use Splice Machine without any specialized skills or training."

A potential acquisition target

    It remains to be seen whether Splice Machine can deliver on its promises and whether RDBMS vendors have reason to worry, Pund-IT's King said.

    "The answer to the first is found in the accolades of the company's 15 pilot customers," he said. "Whether established vendors should be worried is harder to say. Any number of alternative vendors have tried to shake up the RDBMS market without much success to show for it."

    Still, organizations are searching for ways to save money while supporting necessary business applications and processes, King said. Which means Splice Machine could be the subject of much interest.

    "If it truly can deliver the goods, the company could do very well," King said. "[It could] even become an acquisition target by a traditional RDBMS vendor that wishes to capture a bit more big data magic while making life difficult for its competitors."

    兹魏本早先效力于美国宇航局艾姆斯研究中心（NASA Ames Research Center），此前还创立过“蓝色马提尼软件公司”（Blue Martini Software）。

    兹魏本称：“大多数想要应用这种向外扩展技术的竞争对手都专注于分析应用。而我们认为更有价值的可能是支持实时应用，也就是同时在线的一组用户在同一时间读取、写入数据库。这是无人曾涉足过的可扩展性，也正是我们现在的主攻方向。”

“一家颠覆业界的公司”

    Mohr Davidow公司普通合伙人比尔•埃里克森称，Splice Machine在很多方面让那些“拥有50个博士和无数Java程序员”的大公司所能做的事普及化了。这家公司参与了对Splice Machine的A轮及B轮投资。

    他说：“现有这些数据密集型技术的一个问题是，如果企业拥有聪明绝顶的博士，这些技术就能大显神通，但一般企业的资源很有限，”而使用Splice Machine的产品后，“成本只有用Oracle这类产品的10%到25%。用户没必要购买所有的新软件和新工具。他们不仅能省下大笔的基础设施开销，而且不必抛弃过去25年来辛辛苦苦打造的一切。”

    克利夫兰称，Splice Machine的模式“极大地改变了数据库扩展的经济性。Splice Machine的一位客户反映，与其目前的数据库解决方案相比，他们现在的查询速度提高了三到七倍，同时成本却降低了75%。”

    他进一步表示，对InterWest Partners公司来说——它参与了Splice Machine的B轮投资——这家公司“正是我们深信将颠覆业界的典型企业。因为Splice Machine支持标准SQL，它有潜力通过提供低成本、高效率、向外扩展的数据库解决方案代替（或者说颠覆）传统的数据库供应商，而无需让企业重写现有应用。相反，要用NoSQL和NewSQL公司的解决方案，就必须重写现有应用。依靠Splice Machine，编写现有SQL应用的程序员可以无须具备任何专门技巧或培训就能轻松使用Splice Machine的解决方案。”

一个潜在的收购对象

    Pund-IT公司的金表示，关于Splice Machine是否能兑现承诺，以及RDBMS供应商是否会因此忧心忡忡，这两点还有待观察。

    他说：“从这家公司15家首先试用的客户众口一词的赞扬可以发现，它的确没有说大话。而传统供应商是不是该感到担忧就不好说了。很多曾一度想撼动RDBMS市场的供应商都铩羽而归，乏善可陈。”

    金表示，很多企业在支持必要的业务应用和流程的同时，还在设法节约成本。这就意味着Splice Machine将会成为很多公司青睐的对象。

    金说：“如果这家公司确实能交付好的产品，它肯定会蒸蒸日上。它甚至会成为传统RDBMS企业的收购目标，因为这些企业既希望获得更多大数据技术的魔力，同时又让自己对手的日子不好过。”（财富中文网）

    译者：清远