Last week’s O’Reilly Strata Conference brought many of the big names in big data together to build relationships and exchange ideas. The Cube host Jeff Kelly had the chance to sit down and discuss developments with one of them, Lawrence Schwartz Vice President of Marketing at Tokutek.

To kick off the interview, Kelly asked Schwartz about recent developments with Tokutek’s primary product: TokuDB, a system that allows administrators to scale MySQL and MariaDB while also improving insert and query speed, compression, replication performance, and online schema flexibility.

Schwartz explained that data has become more random, and many companies are looking for ways to improve indexing. TokuDB offers fractal tree indexing for MySQL and MariaDB, which can help alleviate the strain that increased memory usage puts on a database system, while also increasing performance.

Beyond MySQL Schwartz said that the company intends to branch out to other database systems, such as MongoDB, an open source NoSQL database that is scalable and high-performance. With TokuDB, users can achieve better insertion performance and better compression with the use of fractal tree technology.

As projects grow and progress, Schwartz said, they may exceed their memory capacity and start writing to disk, which can greatly reduce performance, create query latency, and cause relay issues. Some may look to flash caching or even a completely different database system as a solution. What Tokutek offers is the ability to keep your current database but simply get better performance out of it.

Finally, Schwartz highlighted some interesting use cases for TokuDB, such as analytics for online advertising, social graphs, social search, and machine data, such as the type that NASA must process in large quantities. Kelly then asked Schwartz where he expected the company to be and how it would grow over the next 6 to 12 months. Schwartz answered this question and many others in the full interview, which you can watch right here.