NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular for analyzing big data. There are very few NoSQL solutions, however, that provide the combination of scalability, reliability and data consistency required in a mission-critical application. As the open source implementation of Google's BigTable architecture, HBase is a NoSQL database that integrates directly with Hadoop and meets these requirements for a mission-critical database.

Objectivity, Inc., a provider of NoSQL database solutions for big data, has introduced InfiniteGraph 3.1, delivering improved path finding for faster search results, better ingest performance, expanded visualization features, and navigator plug-in enhancements. With the newest release of InfiniteGraph, companies can discover previously inaccessible relationships and connection information between data faster than ever before, thus unlocking "in-time" answers in their big data.

MarkLogic Corporation, the provider of an enterprise NoSQL database platform, announced that it has closed a $25 million round of growth capital led by Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital, with participation from Northgate Capital. MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom also made a personal investment in this financing round. With capital to fuel sales and marketing, MarkLogic seeks to go after the broader market of enterprise class customers while also targeting several key areas for feature expansion, Bloom told DBTA.

MarkLogic Corporation, the provider of an enterprise NoSQL database platform, announced that it has closed a $25 million round of growth capital led by Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital, with participation from Northgate Capital. MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom also made a personal investment in this financing round. With capital to fuel sales and marketing, MarkLogic seeks to go after the broader market of enterprise class customers while also targeting several key areas for feature expansion, Bloom told DBTA.

Big data has unceremoniously ended the era of the "all-purpose database." The days of sticking uniform data into a single database and running all your business applications off it are gone. Business data today comes in a variety of formats, from countless sources, in huge volumes and at fantastic speeds. Some data is incredibly valuable the instant it arrives, other data is only valuable when combined with large amounts of additional data and analyzed over time.

The term "NoSQL" is widely acknowledged as an unfortunate and inaccurate tag for the non-relational databases that have emerged in the past five years. The databases that are associated with the NoSQL label have a wide variety of characteristics, but most reject the strict transactions and stringent relational model that are explicitly part of the relational design. The ACID (Atomic-Consistent-Independent-Durable) transactions of the relational model make it virtually impossible to scale across data centers while maintaining high availability, and the fixed schemas defined by the relational model are often inappropriate in today's world of unstructured and rapidly mutating data.

10gen, the MongoDB company, has released MongoDB 2.4, featuring hashed-based sharding, capped arrays, text search, and geospatial enhancements. 10gen has also introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level, featuring new monitoring and security features including Kerberos Authentication and role-based privileges.

10gen, the MongoDB company, has released MongoDB 2.4, featuring hashed-based sharding, capped arrays, text search, and geospatial enhancements. 10gen has also introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level, featuring new monitoring and security features including Kerberos Authentication and role-based privileges.

FoundationDB has launched its new ACID-compliant NoSQL database platform, the first to combine NoSQL scalablity with high-performance multi-key ACID transactions across all data within the database, allowing developers to more easily create reliable and highly-scalable applications.

Enterprise NoSQL database provider MarkLogic is making available a free developer license for MarkLogic Enterprise Edition. The developer license provides access to MarkLogic Enterprise Edition features such as integrated search, government-grade security, clustering, replication, failover, alerting, geospatial indexing, conversion, as well as a set of application development tools. MarkLogic also said it is making available a Java-based tool for importing data from MongoDB into MarkLogic.

Garantia Data has announced the general availability of its Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud database hosting services. According to the vendor, these are fully-automated, in-memory NoSQL cloud services offering Memcached and Redis data store systems. With pay-as-you-go pricing, Garantia Data charges users according to the size of their datasets rather than by cloud instances to avoid over-provisioning of RAM resources and allow users to pay for what they actually consume.

Hadoop is the most significant concrete technology behind the so called "Big Data" revolution. Hadoop combines an economical model for storing massive quantities of data - the Hadoop Distributed File System - with a flexible model for programming massively scalable programs - MapReduce. However, as powerful and flexible as MapReduce might be, it is hardly a productive programming model. Programming in MapReduce reminds one of programming in Assembly language - the simplest operations require substantial code.

Hadoop is the most significant concrete technology behind the so called "Big Data" revolution. Hadoop combines an economical model for storing massive quantities of data - the Hadoop Distributed File System - with a flexible model for programming massively scalable programs - MapReduce. However, as powerful and flexible as MapReduce might be, it is hardly a productive programming model. Programming in MapReduce reminds one of programming in Assembly language - the simplest operations require substantial code.

Big data platform vendor DataStax has announced the early adopter program (EAP) of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 3.0, providing core security capabilities to the entire Cassandra community, as well as advanced data protection in an enterprise-grade database. This allows modern enterprises to confidently adopt NoSQL databases as they scale their big data infrastructure.

IT management company ManageEngine has announced that its on-premise application performance monitoring solution, Applications Manager, now supports NoSQL databases Apache Cassandra and MongoDB. This solution monitors application performance and provides operational intelligence for NoSQL technologies in addition to support for traditional relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL and memcached.

Objectivity, Inc., a provider of the object and graph databases, has announced the availability of a new version of its flagship product, Objectivity/DB. Version 11.0 adds new enhancements for deployment, querying, and object clustering for improved big data analysis. Objectivity/DB is deployed in multiple verticals with customers including the U.S. Department of Defense, Ericsson, Siemens and X. "There are really two sets of new features," Leon Guzenda, founder of Objectivity, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is more about tools and the placement of objects, and the other is heavily query-oriented.

Distributed relational database technology vendor GenieDB has launched v 1.0, a MySQL storage engine plug-in that is intended to simplify and accelerate the distribution of mission-critical enterprise applications across multiple data centers and clouds, regardless of location. According to the company, the GenieDB solution provides peak application performance and resiliency and is cost-effective as it eliminates the expenses of switching to a NoSQL solution.

A recent DBTA webcast providing an insightful overview of how graph technology enables organizations with real-time solutions for big data analytics is now available on-demand. Presented by Leon Guzenda, founder of Objectivity, this discussion covers existing graph database use cases and explores the latest features of InfiniteGraph 3.0, a distributed and commercially scalable graph database. The webcast, "Realize the value in your Big Data with Graph Technology," will be archived for the next 90 days.

MetricStream, a provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and quality management solutions, has announced a new big data analytics capability that provides greater visibility and transparency into organizations' risk profile. This capability will allow customers to more effectively manage the ever-increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data and help them overcome their risk management and regulatory compliance challenges.

A webcast on Thursday, January 17, at 9 am PT/ 12 noon ET will provide an insightful overview of how graph technology enables organizations with real-time solutions for Big Data analytics. There are different types of graph database technologies and requirements needed to fully extract value from big data applications for improved services and new revenue generating opportunities. Presented by Leon Guzenda, founder of Objectivity, this discussion will cover existing graph database use cases and explore the latest features of InfiniteGraph 3.0, a distributed and commercially scalable graph database.

The emergence of web-scale apps has put us in the midst of a database crisis. Mobile apps, cloud-based SaaS/PaaS architectures and the distributed nature of the web have forced the software industry to make difficult compromises on how they collect, process and store data. While traditional databases provide the power and simplicity of SQL and the reliability of ACID, they don't scale without herculean-inspired workarounds. Newer, NoSQL solutions come close but don't quite make the last mile. They're designed to scale elastically, even on commodity hardware, but force developers to program powerful querying features into their application and throw away years of learning SQL skills, tools and languages. To give developers a truly modern solution for this century, we need to rethink how we process the collection and storage of data. It's time for a revolution.

Enterprise NoSQL vendor MarkLogic recently brought its summit series to New York. Themed as "Big Data, Beyond the Hype: Delivering Results," the one-day conference included presentations by MarkLogic executives as well as partners and customers. In his opening keynote, CEO Gary Bloom highlighted the need for a next-generation database to address the problems and opportunities posed by big data, while also cautioning that there are "a lot of shiny objects" in the market now trying to capture people's attention that may not deliver the necessary results.

Oracle has announced the release of Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0, an enterprise-grade, key-value database for real-time big data workloads. The new release adds efficient support for storage and retrieval of large objects such as documents and images, tighter integration with both Oracle Database and Hadoop environments, as well as dynamic elasticity and automatic rebalancing for allocating storage and compute resources in response to changing production data processing requirements.

As the undisputed pioneer of big data, Google established most of the key technologies underlying Hadoop and many of the NoSQL databases. The Google File System (GFS) allowed clusters of commodity servers to present their internal disk storage as a unified file system and inspired the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Google's column-oriented key value store BigTable influenced many NoSQL systems such as Apache HBase, Cassandra and HyperTable. And, of course, the Google Map-Reduce algorithm became the foundation computing model for Hadoop and was widely implemented in other NoSQL systems such as MongoDB.

Oracle has announced the release of Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0, an enterprise-grade, key-value database for real-time big data workloads. The new release adds efficient support for storage and retrieval of large objects such as documents and images, tighter integration with both Oracle Database and Hadoop environments, as well as dynamic elasticity and automatic rebalancing for allocating storage and compute resources in response to changing production data processing requirements.

NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has introduced a new release of the company's flagship NoSQL database offering. Couchbase Server 2.0 adds a flexible document data model that allows developers to quickly build and modify web and mobile applications without the restrictions of relational database schemas. In addition, the company says, Couchbase Server 2.0 features consistent high performance, easy scalability, and always-on capabilities for rapid response times and uninterrupted data availability for business-critical web and mobile applications.

Cloudant has joined the Cloud Tools program for Rackspace Hosting and also has announced the immediate availability of its NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for web and mobile applications across the global Rackspace open cloud. This collaboration is intended to enable developers using Rackspace open cloud to benefit from Cloudant as an application data layer that scales up or down on-demand through a management interface.

As the undisputed pioneer of big data, Google established most of the key technologies underlying Hadoop and many of the NoSQL databases. The Google File System (GFS) allowed clusters of commodity servers to present their internal disk storage as a unified file system and inspired the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Google's column-oriented key value store BigTable influenced many NoSQL systems such as Apache HBase, Cassandra and HyperTable. And, of course, the Google Map-Reduce algorithm became the foundation computing model for Hadoop and was widely implemented in other NoSQL systems such as MongoDB.

Are organizations' systems and data environments ready for the big data surge? Far from it, a new survey shows. The survey of 298 members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), conducted by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Oracle Corp., finds fewer than one out of five data managers and executives are confident that their IT infrastructure will be capable of handling the surge of big data. And big data is already here — more than one out of 10 survey respondents report having in excess of a petabyte of data within their organizations, and a majority report their levels of unstructured data are growing. Since big data incorporates so many different data types in varying volumes and from many different sources, it would make both data managers and end users' lives easier if it all could be brought into a single comprehensive framework that can be easily managed and accessed. This, in fact, has long been the holy grail of the IT and database industries — a vision that, unfortunately, has yet to be realized.