Splice Machine, an up-and-coming analytics provider working to move Hadoop beyond batch processing, announced this week that it has raised $15 million in Series B financing from InterWest Partners. Existing investor Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) also participated in the round, which brings the firm’s total funding to an impressive $19 million.

The startup will use the new capital to accelerate product development and bolster sales and marketing efforts ahead of the forthcoming beta release of its flagship offering, a real-time transactional database designed specifically to run on top of Hadoop. Hailed as an industry first, the platform enables business analysts to explore different types of information using familiar SQL syntax, functionality that was originally pioneered by Hadapt in 2009 and is now offered by Cloudera, Hortonworks and a number of other well-established vendors. Nonetheless, the team is confident that it can carve out its own niche in this crowded market.

Another look at SQL

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SQL is certainly regaining interest thanks to the maturing Big Data ecosystem, as Bob Wilkinson, COO of InfiniDB, encourages critics to “take another look” at the early language for data management. Where real-time is concerned, Splice remains an important technology for improving queries within Hadoop and appeals to the workforce actually digging into the data. It’s an interesting emerging thread as Big Data solutions move into the enterprise, as NoSQL has also played an important role in productizing these solutions.

“As most business analysts, data analysts, and data scientists are trained in SQL, SQL remains as important as ever for real-time analytics, especially for ad-hoc, interactive queries,” explained Splice Machine CEO Monte Zweben. “NoSQL’s strength of flexible schema is actually its Achilles Heel with respect to analytics.  The lack of consistent data structure and normalization makes it very difficult to perform the aggregations inherent in analytics.”

“Unlike any other SQL-on-Hadoop database, only Splice Machine supports real-time, ACID-compliant updates for both operational and analytical applications on standard Hadoop distributions,” said Bruce Cleveland, a general partner at InterWest. “With its lockless transactional architecture, Splice Machine fills a critical gap in the SQL-on-Hadoop market.”

Splice Machine was established in 2012 by former NASA artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur Zweben together with tech industry veterans John Leach and Gene Davis. The company claims to have tripled in size and landed 10 charter customers since raising its first round of funding from MDV in October that year, adding a total of 50 enterprise users and racking up a handful of industry awards along the way.

“For companies that want to leverage the cost and scaling advantages of Hadoop, they can finally replace traditional relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle with Splice Machine because it is a real RDBMS on Hadoop,” Zweben, who is the CEO of the company, said in a statement. “We’re confident that this next round of funding will enable us to revolutionize the Hadoop marketplace by powering real-time operational and analytical applications.”

Zweben is really focused on empowering organizations to scale their Big Data solutions for real world use cases, helping them transition to a data-driven era. Hear his commentary on SQL vs. NoSQL and other languages, as well as firsthand accounts on various use cases to learn from, in this segment from theCUBE, broadcasting live from #BigDataSV this week.

co-authored by Maria Deutscher and Kristen Nicole

photo credit: jonycunha via photopin cc