Drawn to Scale raises money to make SQL big-data-ready

Drawn to Scale, a two-year-old startup focused on making SQL ready for the world of big data by combining it with Hadoop, has raised an initial funding round of $ 925,000. The money came from RTP Ventures, IA Ventures and SK Ventures.

Drawn to Scale’s product, Spire, is a distributed database that’s built atop Hadoop and HBase and that aims to do away with standard practices such as sharding for scaling relational databases. Founder and CEO Bradford Stephens described Spire like this in a blog post announcing the funding:

Built for the realities of Big Data, it’s distributed from the ground up so it scales. Our unique distributed indices and single-path query engine make it possible to use SQL in real-time. Unlike sharded databases, where you have to query *every* machine and aggregate the results, Spire knows what data your queries need. This means you can handle far more data and users with less latency.

Despite the prevalence and growing popularity of NoSQL databases, there is still the need to manage relational databases at webscale, something epitomized by Facebook’s massive MySQL deployment. Drawn to Scale is among a number of so-called NewSQL databases, such as ScaleBase, Clustrix, JustOneDB and NuoDB. NuoDB Co-Founder and CEO Barry Morris will be speaking at Structure:Data later this month about the need for these new types of databases to keep SQL alive into the webscale era.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user mandiberg.

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