distributed-sql
(5)
SingleStore and the business of not making people wait
A database built to handle transactions and analytics together found its opening in the seconds between a question and an answer. Now SingleStore is bringing that same impatience to enterprise AI.
Starburst Bet $414 Million That Your Data Should Stay Put
The Boston data company crossed $100 million in recurring revenue by challenging a lucrative industry habit: moving every last byte into one central warehouse. Its pitch is simpler - bring the query to the data.
Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs builds CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database engineered to survive failures the way its namesake insect does. Founded in 2015 by three ex-Google engineers, the company combines the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility of a traditional relational database. CockroachDB powers mission-critical workloads at banks, retailers, gaming platforms, and AI companies that need to stay online through outages, scale across regions, and keep data inside specific jurisdictions for compliance.
TiDB, powered by PingCAP
PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for hybrid transactional and analytical workloads. TiDB scales horizontally across cloud and on-prem deployments, and now powers AI agent workloads through TiDB X with built-in vector search.
Yugabyte
Yugabyte builds YugabyteDB, the open-source distributed SQL database designed for mission-critical cloud-native applications. Founded in 2016 by three ex-Facebook engineers who built Cassandra and HBase, Yugabyte combines full PostgreSQL compatibility with the horizontal scalability and fault tolerance of modern distributed systems. Deployed in 100+ countries and trusted by Fortune 100 companies including GM, Kroger, Shopify, and Charles Schwab, YugabyteDB handles over 1 million transactions per second while surviving node, zone, and region failures automatically. A $1.3B unicorn backed by Lightspeed and Sapphire Ventures, Yugabyte is the rare database company that made its entire core product fully open source - and built a thriving enterprise business around it anyway.