As Splice Machine's Database Goes Open Source, Apache Spark Could Spur it On

Around the time that Splice Machine announced a milestone version of its RDBMS, which it bills as "the first hybrid in-memory RDBMS powered by Hadoop and Spark," its fortunes were starting to rise along with Hadoop's and Spark's. In the big data space, there is tremendous need to marry powerful data analytics tools with powerful database tools. If you're focusing on the Big Data and NoSQL arenas, along with relational databases, Splice Machine is worth a look.

Now, Splice Machine is going open source, and it is also going live in a sandbox version on Amazon Web Services (AWS), so you can easily give it a try.

Splice Machine aims to be a database solution that incorporates both the scalability of Hadoop, ANSI SQL, ACID transactions, and the in-memory performance of Spark. 

ZDNet spoke with Splice Machine CEO  Monte Zweben who believes that: "believes that open sourcing the product will help build a community and an ecosystem around it, which is clearly needed. Nonetheless, Splice Machine does not see open sourcing the product as the only necessary step there. Accordingly, the company will be making major investments in ecosystem infrastructure, including a community Web site with tutorials and code, and an Amazon Web Services-based "sandbox" environment that allows for a low-friction setup of the product in the cloud, for evaluation, training and perhaps some development purposes."

Unlike in-memory only databases, the Splice Machine RDBMS aims to not force companies to put all of their data in-memory, which can become prohibitively expensive as data volume grows. It uses in-memory computation to materialize the intermediate results of long-running queries but uses HBase to store and access data at scale.

Splice Machine is looking to complement the analytical capabilities of enterprise data hubs, and its open source future may put it in front of many more users. We'll stay tuned.