InfiniDB (formerly Calpont Corporation) was a database management software company based in Frisco, Texas. 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 processor (computing), computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations parallel computing, in parallel. GPUs are massively paralle ...

(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 A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

. Only the necessary columns in a query are accessed, reducing I/O activities by skipping unneeded columns. InfiniDB is accessed through a MySQL interface. It then parallelizes queries and executes in a MapReduce fashion (similar in concept to the methodology used by

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...

). 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 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 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

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

{{reflist, 30em 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