Two start-ups, FathomDB and Cloudscale are providing alternatives to traditional database management systems—making claim that traditional databases such as Oracle and SQL Server are just too expensive for today and too difficult to use for the average business user. Their approach to satisfy current “big data” needs steam from the following:
For CloudScale, as noted by CEO and founder Bill McColl, “Today is the age of big data,” and “Data is growing exponentially everywhere. … Excel is the world’s No. 1 tool for processing and analyzing data, with hundreds of millions of users. But for big data, Excel is nowhere near enough.” CloudScal’s service (Cloudcel) allows users to build applications to a large (billions) number of rows of data.
For FathomDB, their offering aligns more with providing database-as-a-service. Running on the Rackspace and Amazon EC2 cloud computing platforms MySQL databases can be had for a price—solving the notion that “SQL doesn’t scale” and providing database at much lower cost than say Oracle. Clearly the advantage here is FathomDB will managed, monitor, backup, tune, etc. a standard database—eliminating the need for users to learn a different database system.