StreamBase – Stonebreaker’s Newest Venture

If you’ve been in the database world for a while, the name Michael Stonebreaker will be a familiar one to you.  Michael was responsible for the creation of two important relational database systems, Ingres and Postgre.  Ingres is now a part of CA (and open-sourced as the product OpenIngres).  While Postgre has matured into the 2^nd most popular open-source relational database platform PostgreSQL.  Stonebreaker also founded Illustra, which brought several innovative ideas to the forefront of the database scene.  Illustra was eventually acquired by Informix, which was later acquired by IBM.

Now, Michael is introducing an extremely interesting new database technology especially geared toward analyzing huge streams of incoming data – StreamBase (http://www.streambase.com). Because it works at orders of magnitude faster than traditional database platforms, and because it looks at the data streams without storing them to disk like traditional database platforms, StreamBase looks to do something no one else is currently able to handle.  They call this new technology a 'stream processing engine'. I’m very interested to see how this experiment turns out!

Get an overview of the product at

http://www.forbes.com/enterprisetech/2005/01/18/cz_dl_0118streambase.html?partner=

What do you think of this new way to approach streaming data?  Does this match any use case in your IT shop?

Thanks,

-Kevin