Making Real Time a Reality: 5 Things You Missed at SingleStore [r]evolution 2022

Life moves in real time, and the modern world expects real-time insights and action.

The foundation for making real-time real is your choice of database. The more complex the data plumbing, the longer it takes for you to ingest, analyze and act on data.

During our [r]evolution 2022 event that we recently hosted, we talked about how SingleStoreDB was built ground-up for real-time use cases, explained what it means to be real time, detailed innovations that enable data evolution, referenced research highlighting the performance and savings evolution benefits that are now possible, noted why businesses need (and some already have) a database for the data-intensive era and outlined the best path forward to achieving true real-time operations.

All the sessions are now available to view on demand at your own pace, but I thought it might be helpful to showcase five key takeaways from [r]evolution 2022.

One: It’s time to get real about real time.

As SingleStore CEO Raj Verma explained, there is a lot of noise going around in our market about real time. Raj helped to clear the air so that people can more easily differentiate real, real-time database companies from businesses that talk the real-time talk but cannot walk the walk.

Shireesh Thota, SingleStore’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, explained that the modern data stack is broken. The complexity of these transformations, he said, lead customers to build a lot of siloed enterprise architectures, and what ends up happening is that the time to insight is much longer. So there’s a need to shorten the time between the moment a transactional piece of data enters the system and when the business can gain insights.

Real time needs fast technology. But what makes a database fast is not really query optimization, as Raj noted — it’s the storage architecture. Our three-tier storage architecture — memory, disk and object store — empowers customers with response times within milliseconds. Our unification of different data models (relational, key-value, time-series, geospatial, full-text search, document, etc.) allows customers to do most work using a single platform rather than having to stitch together databases. And SingleStore pioneered the unification of transactions and analytics in one engine enabling ultra-fast ingest and time to insights. All that provides SingleStore customers with speed, scale, savings, resilience and reliability that are beyond compare.

Two: SingleStore continues to innovate.

Despite our leadership position, we are not resting on our laurels. SingleStore continues to innovate. At [r]evolution 2022, we detailed our expanded SingleStoreDB capabilities, which are based on three pillars: enterprise scale, developer experience and real-time analytics.

Workspaces is among the recently released SingleStoreDB features. It enables enterprise scale by allowing our customers to build isolated compute workspace environments that can be attached to the same database on demand. That means a company could, for example, build BI dashboards, point-in-time sales and other applications all on the same data — without having to move the data and without introducing latency or adding cost.

Developer experience is also near and dear to our hearts, and we understand that WebAssembly (Wasm) is popular for building highly efficient applications and has amazing characteristics such as portability and safety. So, we have deeply integrated Wasm into our Code Engine. Now developers don’t have to move data and worry about latency and other challenges that data movement creates.

In our latest real-time analytics innovations, we introduced flexible parallelism, which enables queries to take advantage of all available hardware and run on all cores. This is very useful for complex queries. Some customers have benefited from performance increases approaching 4X from this feature. Our Power BI Connector is now certified by Microsoft, so SingleStoreDB users don’t need any third-party extensions. And our dbt adapters help developers to build workflow environments.

Three: A unified database improves performance and yields savings.

Not only does a unified database enable real-time speed, but it also delivers major savings.

You don’t have to take our word for it, as Raj said. Just look at the stellar results that SingleStore achieved in the recent performance and total cost of ownership benchmark study by GigaOm.

The independent report by the respected tech analyst firm found that SingleStoreDB is 50% more cost-effective over three years than the Snowflake-MySQL stack. GigaOm said that organizations can achieve 60% savings over three years using SingleStoreDB as opposed to a Redshift-PostgreSQL stack. And GigaOm said that we are up to 100% faster than Redshift for TPC-H workloads. What’s more, SingleStoreDB is one of the only databases that can do TPC-H and TPC-DS competitively with cloud data warehouses and TPC-C benchmark in a very reasonable scale.

Four: Data intensity is here to stay — you can succumb to it or use it to thrive.

Almost all applications depend one way or the other on data, and the data requirements of applications are becoming more and more rigorous. As SingleStore Chief Innovation Officer Oliver Schabenberger explained during [r]evolution 2022, that’s a sign of data intensity.

Data intensity depends on many factors, including (1) data size, (2) speed of ingestion, (3) latency requirements, (4) complexity and (5) concurrency. Such factors lead many companies to add one database after another to address these considerations and add functionality. Unfortunately, that leads to highly complex systems, based on a multitude of technologies, that are difficult to maintain and nearly impossible to scale. But there is a better way.

SingleStore’s general-purpose, cloud-native database for transactional workloads that has multi-model capabilities and is built for speed allows organizations to address data intensity without complexity — and that is a measure of digital maturity. Leading companies such as Uber, Comcast and ARMIS use SingleStore to solve data-intensive problems every day.

Visit SingleStore.com and use our data-intensity calculator to get your data intensity score, based on the five dimensions we've noted.

Five: Leading companies are evolving and succeeding — and you can, too.

SingleStore helps businesses thrive in today’s data-intensive, real-time environment. Just look at what SingleStore customers and [r]evolution speakers Siemens and Impact have achieved:

“With the stack we were in before, as much as we tried to optimize data, structures and SQL itself, we couldn’t get report run times to go under two seconds,” said Mauricio Aristizabal, principal data architect at Impact, “whereas with SingleStore we’ve been able to address all the different reporting needs in sub-second times. So, that was the main requirement – to be able to deliver a positive human experience and delight our customers. Now that we’ve adopted SingleStore as our full data warehouse, we are able to serve all other workloads. Being able to have data in one place and serve all kinds of different tenants and workloads is just wonderful.”

Christoph Malassa, head of analytics and intelligence solutions at Siemens, said this about his SingleStore experience: “We now have the ability to do analytics on data volumes that we couldn’t do in the past. We are now doing more and more advanced analytics live. The analytics that you can now do give you way more insight. This is tremendous for the business. And the process improvements that SingleStore enables makes it a lot easier for us to innovate faster.”

Uber is another leading company that uses SingleStore to solve data-intensive problems every day. It employs SingleStoreDB to get real-time analytics on riders and drivers 24/7.

It makes me immensely proud that, in our own small way,  SingleStore is helping deliver great customer experiences and timely insights that improve people’s lives.

See if SingleStoreDB is right for you by trying it for free. Check out our customer reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius. And of course, explore the SingleStore [r]evolution sessions on demand here.