Apache Cassandra database firm DataStax Inc. has just raised $106 million in a series E funding round led by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers (KPCB). The company now has a valuation of around $830 million, and has attracted total funding of over $190 million.

As far as today’s cash injection goes, DataStax says the money will be used to expand its operations overseas, and it will also increase it’s investment in the open-source Cassandra community.

DataStax is one of a group of startups building businesses atop of open source databases designed to organize, manage and analyze information scattered around the Internet. It competes with established offerings from legacy database providers that include Oracle Corp, Microsoft Corp, and IBM Corp. DataStax’s Enterprise platform, which counts Netflix and eBay among its customers, consists of analytics, search and management tools, plus support on top of its certified Apache Cassandra open-source NoSQL distributed database.

“Traditional database players like Oracle tie their architecture to high-end storage devices,” Pfeil said in an interview. “Those fly in the face of economics, and to really capture the power of big data, you have to look at newer technology. I’m willing to bet that roughly 80 percent of our opportunities are Oracle replacement.”

Red Hot NoSQL

NoSQL database’s are hot right now, having grabbed some serious investment money this year as developers bid to go beyond the limitations of traditional SQL query language. Companies like Couchbase, MongoDB and Redis Labs are just some of the companies that have benefited from this influx of cash.

The amount of money pouring into the sector was addressed by Jonathan Ellis, the company’s co-founder and CTO, in an interview with Data Center Knowledge.

“There’s a lot of fast followers in the market,” Ellis said. “There’s money to be made, and VC will continue to fund more competition.”

Ellis also predicted that we’d see fragmentation of the NoSQL market into two sub-markets – a smaller market for what he describes as the ‘hacker crowd’ with a small team and a small dataset, and a second, larger market for enterprises with a larger customer base and a larger team of people working on it.

“If your dataset fits on a single machine, it doesn’t really matter whether you use MySQL or MongoDB or Berkeley DB or whatever — go crazy,” he told ZDnet. “But if you’re building something for dozens of machines to hundreds or even thousands, then you really should probably be using Cassandra.”

The latest funding round comes following the general release of DataStax Enterprise 4.5 last June, which uses Apache Spark to provide in-memory analytics as well as its existing in-memory transactional processing.

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