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This company was probably an extremely easy investment decision: 1) Facebookers: Check 2) Data Scaling experience: Check 3) In-Memory with SQL semantics: Che

This company was probably an extremely easy investment decision: 1) Facebookers: Check 2) Data Scaling experience: Check 3) In-Memory with SQL semantics: Check 4) New-York based software that can be sold to quant funds: Check I'm excited. It's downloading now.

vessenes 14y ago
p.s. Eric, two annoyances about your site: once I've been dumped on to the developers subsite, it's non-trivial to get back to the main company homepage. Also, pricing. Come on, man! Pricing!!
- ericfrenkiel 14y ago
  Thanks! We'll add a link back to memsql.com =) What did you think of the video and diagram on developers?
  - ecaron 14y ago
    I think none of that really matters until we see the price. There's a trial version and a free version of Microsoft SQL, but their full version can quickly top $20k without much effort - knowing how bad your "ouch" will be is key before I'd spend any time on the "ahhhh."
  - vessenes 14y ago
    The diagram was fine; I didn't watch the video. I'll hit it up later. p.s. Isn't a totally reasonable business model for a truly faster DB engine "free, everywhere, bought by Oracle?"
    - nikita 14y ago
      We think a lot about it. And even though this model definitely makes sense, we would like to build a business that can generate money and pay for itself.
moe 14y ago
Is it just me or does this entire product smell like it was designed for the sole purpose of extracting money from less than tech-savvy investors and clueless institutions? The bullshit-bingo-lingo on their homepage is mindnumbing. Meanwhile their actual software seems rather underwhelming, bordering on SnakeOil.
- vessenes 14y ago
  If you've ever tried to use SQL on a large, but fittable-in-memory dataset on existing row databases, then you would not be underwhelmed. Existing non-finance-industry solutions suck for things like mid-size trading queries, or (in coinlab's case) work setups that require periodic, frequent table scans. You can buy something like kdb, but that costs $70k a year and requires that your engineers learn some extremely new semantics if they're only used to SQL and (choose any popular language here, Python to C++).
  - moe 14y ago
    So, MemSQL is a ColumnStore now? The docs didn't make that clear for me. Anyway, why is there not a single benchmark available to support the sales-pitch? (In your favor I'll just pretend you didn't mention kdb here...)
    - nikita 14y ago
      MemSQL is a row store. KDB is single threaded. More benchmarks are coming!
      - vessenes 14y ago
        http://kx.com/faq.php http://kx.com/faq.php seems pretty clear that kdb is multi-threaded. "Does kdb+ support multiple cores and/or multi-threading? Yes, both are built right in to the system and this makes kdb+ extraordinarily fast when compared with traditional applications, as it can make full use of all available cores. " This ties with my own experience using it.
ericfrenkiel 14y ago
Thanks! We're super-excited to have the opportunity to build this. When we started we asked ourselves - what would a database look like if it were designed today? We see a future where OLTP databases live in memory, and where you have hundreds of terabytes of memory and hundreds to thousands of CPUs at your disposal. We built MemSQL to make it easy to go directly into memory and get the speed improvements we all need. What we're releasing aims to fulfills that vision.

vessenes 14y ago

p.s. Eric, two annoyances about your site: once I've been dumped on to the developers subsite, it's non-trivial to get back to the main company homepage. Also, pricing. Come on, man! Pricing!!

ericfrenkiel 14y ago
Thanks! We'll add a link back to memsql.com =) What did you think of the video and diagram on developers?
- ecaron 14y ago
  I think none of that really matters until we see the price. There's a trial version and a free version of Microsoft SQL, but their full version can quickly top $20k without much effort - knowing how bad your "ouch" will be is key before I'd spend any time on the "ahhhh."
- vessenes 14y ago
  The diagram was fine; I didn't watch the video. I'll hit it up later. p.s. Isn't a totally reasonable business model for a truly faster DB engine "free, everywhere, bought by Oracle?"
  - nikita 14y ago
    We think a lot about it. And even though this model definitely makes sense, we would like to build a business that can generate money and pay for itself.

moe 14y ago

Is it just me or does this entire product smell like it was designed for the sole purpose of extracting money from less than tech-savvy investors and clueless institutions? The bullshit-bingo-lingo on their homepage is mindnumbing. Meanwhile their actual software seems rather underwhelming, bordering on SnakeOil.

vessenes 14y ago
If you've ever tried to use SQL on a large, but fittable-in-memory dataset on existing row databases, then you would not be underwhelmed. Existing non-finance-industry solutions suck for things like mid-size trading queries, or (in coinlab's case) work setups that require periodic, frequent table scans. You can buy something like kdb, but that costs $70k a year and requires that your engineers learn some extremely new semantics if they're only used to SQL and (choose any popular language here, Python to C++).
- moe 14y ago
  So, MemSQL is a ColumnStore now? The docs didn't make that clear for me. Anyway, why is there not a single benchmark available to support the sales-pitch? (In your favor I'll just pretend you didn't mention kdb here...)
  - nikita 14y ago
    MemSQL is a row store. KDB is single threaded. More benchmarks are coming!
    - vessenes 14y ago
      http://kx.com/faq.php http://kx.com/faq.php seems pretty clear that kdb is multi-threaded. "Does kdb+ support multiple cores and/or multi-threading? Yes, both are built right in to the system and this makes kdb+ extraordinarily fast when compared with traditional applications, as it can make full use of all available cores. " This ties with my own experience using it.

ericfrenkiel 14y ago

Thanks! We're super-excited to have the opportunity to build this. When we started we asked ourselves - what would a database look like if it were designed today? We see a future where OLTP databases live in memory, and where you have hundreds of terabytes of memory and hundreds to thousands of CPUs at your disposal. We built MemSQL to make it easy to go directly into memory and get the speed improvements we all need. What we're releasing aims to fulfills that vision.