The NoSQL space became a little less crowded this week after Percona LLC acquired  partner Tokutek, Inc. for its unique indexing capabilities. The deal marks the latest in a wave of consolidation that has swept over the world of non-relational data stores over the last few months.

That trend most recently saw Apple snap up a similarly low-key startup called FoundationDB, Inc. with an extensible key-value store notable for its ability to quickly and reliably write information to storage. Tokutek is touting the same value proposition, but the underlying implementation is radically different.

The startup’s storage engine replaces the 40-year-old B-Tree structure that FoundationDB and most other databases employ with a newer alternative developed by its founders during their days in the academia. The model, known as the Fractal Tree Index, was created with modern storage requirements in mind.

The technology writes data to an intermediate destination on each node from where changes are propagated in bulk to the local disk drives once the buffer space fills up, an approach that is much more efficient than making several, smaller direct modifications as is done with B-Tree. According to Tokutech, that allows for potentially exponentially faster insertion and deletion of records in large-scale distributed environments.

But even coupled with the ACID-compliance of its storage engine, reliability that has thus far only been matched by a handful of other non-relational systems including FoundationDB, that apparently still wasn’t enough to set apart the startup apart from its larger competitors. The technology should, however, provide a major boost for Percona own efforts to compete against those very companies.

The deal buys the database specialist the exclusive rights for the Fractal Tree Index, which likely means that systems competing with its flavor of MySQL will no longer have the ability to take advantage of Tokutek’s storage engine going forward. Just as significantly, the transaction also includes the startup’s distribution of the popular MongoDB document store, thereby giving Percona an entry into the NoSQL space.

That opens up a potentially highly lucrative opportunity to up-sell existing users of its MySQL version, many of which have probably already made up their minds about adopting a non-relational system if the rapid rise of such platforms in the broader market is anything to go by. And since Percona is primarily professional services business, that not only means additional licensing revenue but new training, consultancy, support and remote management deals as well.

No financial terms were disclosed for the acquisition, but the company did say that Tokutek customers will continue to receive care services for the duration of their existing contracts. The transaction officially went through last Tuesday.

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