InfiniDB (formerly Calpont Corporation) was a
database management
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...
software company based in
Frisco, Texas
Frisco is a city in Collin and Denton counties in the U.S. state of Texas. It is part of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and about from both Dallas Love Field and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Its population was 200,509 at the 2 ...
. The company developed InfiniDB, a scalable, software-only columnar database management system for analytic applications.
InfiniDB is a scalable database built for
big data
Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...
analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing and other read-intensive applications. InfiniDB's
column-store architecture enables very quick load and query times. Its
massive parallel processing
Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
(MPP) technology scales with any type of storage hardware.
In 2014, The company raised $7.5 million in a new round of funding led by McDonnell Ventures.
Columnar databases
By storing and managing data based on columns rather than rows, column-oriented architecture overcomes query limitations that exist in traditional row-based
RDBMS. Only the necessary columns in a query are accessed, reducing I/O activities by skipping unneeded columns.
InfiniDB is accessed through a
MySQL
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
interface. It then parallelizes queries and executes in a
MapReduce
MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster.
A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...
fashion (similar in concept to the methodology used by
Apache Hadoop). Each thread within the distributed architecture operates independently, avoiding thread-to-thread or node-to-node communication that can cripple scaling.
InfiniDB is used to enable performance-intensive analytic applications. Customers include Bandwidth.com, Tucows, Warner Music Group, Genus, Aviation Software International, Caring Bridge, Navigant Consulting and 1&1 Internet.
InfiniDB resellers included SkySQL (including many former
MySQL
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
employees) and KK Ashisuto in Japan.
Variants and forks
On October 16, 2013, the company announced that InfiniDB would be licensed under the
General Public License v. 2. The open source variants of InfiniDB databases are: ''InfiniDB Standard Edition'' and ''InfiniDB for the Cloud'' including ''InfiniDB for Apache Hadoop''.
MariaDB
MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...
Corporation announced on April 5, 2016 the release of its first big data analytics engine, ''MariaDB ColumnStore''. It is based both on a fork of InfiniDB and open-source community contributions. ColumnStore supports use cases including real-time, batch and algorithmic.
Bankruptcy
On October 1, 2014, InfiniDB ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy protection in US Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Texas. Existing customers may be able to receive support from other companies, notably MariaDB.
References
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American companies established in 2000
American companies disestablished in 2014
Computer companies established in 2000
Computer companies disestablished in 2014
Data warehousing products
Proprietary database management systems
Free database management systems
MySQL
MariaDB
Free system software
Software companies based in Texas
Cloud infrastructure
Defunct software companies of the United States