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Yugabyte, provider of an open source SQL database based on a document database architecture, today announced it has garnered an additional $48 million funding.
The funding will be employed to advance the development and adoption of a database that is compatible with the application programming interfaces (APIs) employed to build and deploy applications on the open source Cassandra database, Yugabyte CTO Karthik Ranganathan said. The query layer provided in the YCQL query layer is compatible with the semi-relational API used in the open source Cassandra database.
At the same time, Yugabyte employs a front end based on the open source Postgres database that is compatible with SQL, the lingua franca query language widely employed by most enterprise IT applications. That approach provides database administrators (DBAs) and developers with a familiar construct for building and deploying applications versus requiring them to learn how to master yet another database, Ranganathan said. “There are already too many databases,” he added.
The latest funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional participation from Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures, and 8VC. It follows a $30 million round raised last June to bring the company’s total funding to $103 million. The funds will be used to accelerate enterprise adoption of Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any cloud platform or Kubernetes-based cluster, and Yugabyte Cloud, a managed database service currently available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.
The company claims members of its open source community have now deployed more than 600,000 clusters running its database software. There are also now 170 developers making contributions to the project.
Yugabyte most recently added support for the open Hasura GraphQL Engine to make it possible to run applications that expose GraphQL APIs as an alternative to traditional REST APIs. There is also now support for the latest version of the Apache Spark in-memory computing framework for processing analytics. In addition, Yugabyte is now certified to be deployed on the VMware Tanzu instance of Kubernetes curated by VMware.
While the types of databases being employed in enterprise IT environments have increased dramatically, each new database platform increases the total cost of IT. There’s no doubt that a new generation of microservices-based applications that tend to be latency-sensitive will benefit from databases that can scale out more easily. However, Yugabyte is making a case for solving that issue in a way that reduces the overall complexity IT teams would otherwise have to manage.
Of course, Yugabyte isn’t the only provider of a database platform designed from the ground up to scale out. At a time when compute and storage resources can be dynamically invoked, IT teams would prefer to not have to allocate a specific amount of infrastructure to a database. In recent years, IT organizations have also shown a marked preference for open source databases that are less expensive to deploy, assuming application performance requirements are met.
Regardless of the type of database employed, it’s apparent that SQL remains the dominant query language, despite the rise of NoSQL databases. Most of these databases are NoSQL in name only. The primary difference is that unlike a traditional SQL database, they are not dependent on a relational model commonly employed in, for example, the Oracle database. That doesn’t necessarily mean relational databases are obsolete, but it might mean the number of use cases for a relational database are constrained, given the other viable alternatives.
In the meantime, the challenge enterprise IT teams face is reining in developers who tend to select databases for their applications with little regard to how they will be managed over time.
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