Clustrix is one many NoSQL startups gaining traction in today’s market.  This ecosystem has seen a lot of innovation from smaller players (or at least ones overshadowed by the size of structured data behemoth Oracle), and Clustrix is among them. The company’s distributed relational database system differentiates itself by offering the capacity to easily scale, and scale big, to handle massive amounts of data.

Today’s news is that Massive Media managed to leverage Clustrix’s database to accommodate the four million users its social network, Twoo, gained in about six month. It didn’t have to shard the DB nor has it seen any downtime caused by usage spikes, according to a statement.

“Pre-Clustrix, we spent a lot of time on optimizing for performance and scale. Now we can spend those resources better,” said Lorenz Bogaert, co-founder and CEO of Massive Media. “It does not make sense to build a new site using the old system of sharding MySQL.”

Alongside Massive Media’s achievement, the company also revealed  the Clustrix Development Kit. The free download is a software-based sandbox environment that lets users toy around with the capabilities of Clustrix database appliance without actually having to buy the hardware.

Oracle’s MySQL is losing ground and buzz to NoSQL and other alternatives, often with equally catchy name. In an interview with SiliconANGLE last year MIT Professor Michael Stonebraker pointed to NewSQL as the biggest trending topic in 2012, and he’s not the only one who’s been making bets against MySQL.

Oracle itself has begun expanding on what was at first – and still is – regarded as a marketing ploy rather than a serious move. The DB giant is actually investing in unstructured data analytics and Hadoop, most recently via a team-up with Cloudera, one of the biggest players in this industry.