SingleStore Inc., the database startup formerly known as MemSQL, is transforming its product to address both analytical and transactional workloads.

SingleStore’s relational database enables companies to process large volumes of information in real time. It has multiple use cases. An online retailer, for example, can use the database to analyze website visitors’ activity and detect changes in shopping behavior as they happen. Manufacturers could deploy machine learning models on SingleStore to analyze streams of real-time sensory data from industrial equipment.

SingleStore said today its database is now the first in the world to support both analytical and transactional workloads, and claimed the announcement is a “watershed moment” for the database industry. Traditionally, it said, databases have always been architected for just one of the two workloads but never both.

“Never before has a company architected a database for both analytics and transactional workloads,” said SingleStore Chief Executive Raj Verma. “SingleStore provides the world’s only highly performant, hybrid multicloud database that unifies analytical and transactional workloads. In introducing this, we’ve created a new category that will define the future of databases and data platforms.”

The secret sauce that made this happen is a built-in extract, transform and load tool called Pipelines that eliminates the need for expensive, standalone ETL tools normally required to perform analytics in real time on other databases. Added to this is universal storage with multicolumn key support, which means users no longer have to separate their operational and analytical systems, the company said.

The SingleStore database has also separated storage and compute, a feature that was previously only available in data warehouses. Further, the company said, it now offers point-in-time recovery that enables a system-of-record capability.

SingleStore Chief Product Officer Jordan Tigani explained that by separating storage and compute, data-intensive workloads can scale more cost-effectively while maintaining an extremely high performance.

“Point-in-time recovery enables system-of-record capability, allowing users to run their businesses on SingleStore with confidence,” he added. “Universal storage is the last step in realizing the vision of a single database that supports both analytical and transactional workloads in one place. Now developers can add analytics to their applications, and data engineers can keep up with rapidly changing data using SingleStore.”

“The database world is morphing quickly from specialized to universal databases, with the merger of the OLTP and OLAP chasm being the most recent area of innovation,” said analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “Today it is SingleStore’s turn to provide enterprises with another new alternative to traditional workload separation by use case. It is good to see that SingleStore offers the new offering as a managed service, as this is the preferred consumption choice of enterprises, as it allows them not to get into the details of the database platform management.”

The SingleStore database is available as a managed service on public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and also as a self-hosted platform.

Image: SingleStore