Last night I had a opportunity to see a demo of Splice Machine which was pretty cool from a technology perspective. Splice Machine took Apache Derby, a lightweight ANSI SQL standard database and “spliced” it into HBase. This essentially created an SQL interface into Hbase. This product illustrates the power of combining different open source projects to meet business needs. The result is an ANSI SQL compliant transaction processing database on top of Hbase/Hadoop. Pretty neat!
Splice Machine as expected, presented some compelling TCO numbers. With no upfront licensing costs we expect this from an open source company. However, with open source solutions, companies will need to realistically understand the true development and support costs. These costs tend to be 70-80% of a 3-year TCO and should be balanced against the risks associated with a startup company.
So, if you are looking to cost effectively scale a transactional database and leveraging the Hadoop infrastructure is a viable option, consider SpliceMachine. As Senator Palpatine watched the young Skywalker’s career with great interest, we shall too watch the development of Splice Machine with great interest.
One last item. Please join me for a webinar on November 5 titled “Creating a Business Case for Big Data.” During this webinar we will be investigating different approaches to formulating solid Big Data business cases. See you there!
[pardot-form height=”800″ id=”33862″ title=”EIS: 2014-11-5: Webinar BLOG form; Creating a Business Case for Big Data”]
