Citing the results of a recent benchmark study conducted by Thumbtack Technology, NoSQL startup Aerospike boasts that its database offering is 10 times more powerful than the leading alternatives on the market today.

Aerospike was pitted against Apache Cassandra and MongoDB; Couchbase Server was also supposed to be on the list, but Thumbtack apparently encountered technical difficulties that made it impossible to evaluate the system in the testing environment. The services firm fed 500 million records into each database and measured the time it took each to process the information.

In the read-heavy benchmark Aerospike reached a maximum throughput of 300,000 operations per second, roughly 10x the performance of its nearest competitor, Cassandra. When it came to processing a balanced workload, Aerospike’s software crunched its way through the data five times faster than Cassandra.

Adding insult to injury, Aerospike maintained far lower latency than the two rivaling databases: Thumbtack reported a consistent sub-millisecond delay that didn’t increase significantly even while processing as much as 400,000 operations per second.  In comparison, latency for Cassandra measured between sub-millisecond levels and 8 milliseconds, while 10gen’s MongoDB varied from 1 to 20 milliseconds.

The big game changer is flash. Most NoSQL DBs are not optimized to run on SSDs, but Aerospike takes full advantage of it.

“From the start, we recognized that a database optimized for both flash and DRAM would be ideal for emerging classes of applications that live or die by their ability to reliably respond within milliseconds,” said Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike founder and CTO. “Today our customers rely on our native flash Aerospike database to achieve both the real-time responses and 100% uptime that this extremely high performance enables. Now the Thumbtack benchmark adds significant new validation of the value in optimizing databases and applications for SSDs.”

Tapad is one of the clients that is taking advantage of Aerospike’s technology to serve hundreds of thousands of impressions per second. Dag Liodden, the digital advertising firm’s founding CTO, talked all about his company’s implementation in a Peer Incite even last November.