Part 2 of CRN’s Big Data 100 takes a look at the vendors solution providers should know in the database systems space.

Running The Bases

By 2025 the total amount of digital data generated, gathered, copied and consumed is expected to be in the range of 175 to 180 zettabytes. And more of that data is spread across distributed, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud networks.

To make productive use of the ever-growing volumes of data, businesses and organizations need the right database systems to manage all that data and make it available for transactional and analytical applications.

Not surprisingly, the global market for database management systems, which reached $63.50 billion in 2022, is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 11.56 percent to $152.36 billion by 2030, according to Zion Market Research.

As part of the CRN 2024 Big Data 100, we’ve put together the following list of database system companies—from well-established vendors to those in startup mode—that solution providers should be familiar with.

These vendors offer next-generation relational database systems that can handle growing volumes of data and transactions, analytical databases designed to process complex queries against huge data sets – and some databases that can do both – along with more specialized systems such as graph databases and time series databases.

This week CRN is running the Big Data 100 list in a series of slide shows, organized by technology category, spotlighting vendors of business analytics software, database systems, data warehouse and data lake systems, data management and integration software, data observability tools, and big data systems and cloud platforms.

Some vendors have big data product portfolios that span multiple technology categories. They appear in the slideshow for the technology segment in which they are most prominent.

Aerospike

Top Executive: CEO Subbu Iyer

Aerospike markets its next-generation NoSQL database for high performance transactional, analytical and AI/machine learning tasks. It describes its database product as a “massively scalable, millisecond latency, real-time database” that provides fast reads/writes and “unmatched uptime.”

Aerospike’s offerings include the Aerospike Database 7 server (introduced in November 2023), a cloud database-as-a-service, and a cloud managed service on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. Also available is a graph database for managing real-time data relationships and vector search capabilities – the latter for powering AI applications.

Earlier this month Aerospike, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., raised an impressive $109 million in a growth capital funding round.

Cockroach Labs

Top Executive: CEO Spencer Kimball

Cockroach Labs develops CockroachDB, a high-availability, distributed SQL database for developing and running mission-critical, transaction-heavy applications.

The New York-based company says its database is built on top of a transactional and consistent key-value store that is highly scalable and can withstand datacenter failures. (The company’s name is inspired by the insect, as is the CockroachDB motto: “Scale fast. Survive disaster. Thrive everywhere.”)

Earlier this month Cockroach was selected to join the Google Distributed Cloud, which does not require Google Cloud connectivity of the public internet to manage infrastructure, services, APIs or tooling. Google Distributed Cloud is targeted toward the public sector and highly regulated industries that require flexibility to support regional data residency, security or isolation regulations.

Couchbase

Top Executive: President and CEO Matt Cain

Couchbase develops a NoSQL cloud database for business-critical and AI-powered applications. The core technology is a distributed, JSON document database “with all the desired capabilities of a relational DBMS,” according to the company.

In addition to the NoSQL database server, the company offers its Couchbase Capella database-as-a-service for GenAI, vector search and mobile application services.

For its fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 31) Santa Clara, Calif.-based Couchbase reported revenue of $180.0 million, up 16 percent from fiscal 2023.

DataStax

Top Executive: CEO Chet Kapoor

DataStax develops its DataStax Enterprise NoSQL and vector database on the open-source Apache Cassandra database with a focus on providing real-time data for applications. The flagship database, in turn, is the foundation for Astra DB, the company’s cloud-native database-as-a-service offering.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also markets its Astra Streaming data streaming software for real-time data and generative AI applications.

In a move to strengthen its hand in the AI data and application development arena, DataStax earlier this month acquired Langflow, provider of a popular framework for building generative AI applications that use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology.

Datometry

Top Executive: CEO Mike Waas

Datometry calls itself “a pioneer” in developing database system virtualization technology.

Database virtualization decouples the database layer, usually residing between data storage and applications within an application stack, making it possible to pool compute and storage resources and allocate them as needed, according to the company. The technology prevents vendor lock-in, according to the company, and makes it easier to move to migrate from one database to another.

Datometry, headquartered in San Francisco, provides editions of its Hyper-Q platform for Microsoft Azure Databricks, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery and Amazon Red shift.

In November the company debuted OpenDB, a fully compatible drop-in replacement for Oracle databases. (OpenDB v2 shipped in February.) In March it announced support for Microsoft Fabric and earlier this month announced support for Oracle workloads on native Google databases.

EDB

Top Executive: CEO Kevin Dallas

EDB (previously EnterpriseDB) offers secure, scalable database software based on the open-source Postgres SQL database. The company’s popular database is compatible with the Oracle relational database.

In addition to the EDB Enterprise Advanced database server and EDB Postgres Distributed database, the company provides the EDB BigAnimal Postgres-as-a-service managed database.

Dallas took over as CEO of Bedford, Mass.-based EDB in August 2023 and in a recent interview with CRN outlined his plans to expand the use cases for the EDB database portfolio beyond transaction processing into data analytics and AI applications.

In October 2023 EDB acquired Splitgraph, which develops a Postgres-compatible serverless SQL API for building data-driven applications that support hundreds of data sources.

EdgeDB

Top Executive: CEO Yury Selivanov

EdgeDB describes its offering as “an open-source database designed as a spiritual successor to SQL and the relational paradigm.”

The database is powered by the Postgres query engine with a data schema model that the company calls “graph-relational” and a query language, EdgeQL, that “blends the best” of GraphQL and SQL.

EdgeDB 1.0 launched in February 2022. The company raised $15 million in a Series A funding round in November 2022.

In November 2023 the San Francisco-based company debuted EdgeDB 4.0 and a cloud edition of the database.

Exasol

Top Executive: CEO Joerg Tewes

Exasol develops a column-oriented, in-memory database for high-performance data analytics and business intelligence tasks. The database works with a long list of the most popular analytics tools including Tableau, Qlik Sense, MicroStrategy, Looker, PowerBI, Yellowfin and more.

In February of this year Exasol launched Espresso AI – built on the company’s Exasol Espresso query engine – which combines business intelligence and AI capabilities to improve BI reports with predictive machine learning models for such tasks as demand forecasting, fraud detection and churn prediction.

Tewes was named Exasol’s CEO effective Jan. 1, 2023, taking over from the previous CEO, Aaron Auld, who stepped down from the post in September 2022. Exasol is headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany.

Imply

Top Executive: CEO Fangjin Yang

Imply provides a real-time analytics platform based on Apache Druid, an open-source analytics database that was originally developed by Imply’s founders.

Imply, based in Burlingame, Calif., says analytics applications built on Imply Polaris, the company’s fully managed cloud database-as-a-service, can scale up to any number of users, work with streaming or batch data, and deliver sub-second queries on millions – even trillions – of rows of data.

InfluxData

Top Executive: CEO Evan Kaplan

InfluxData develops the InfluxDB time series database for ingesting, analyzing and storing time-based columnar data. InfluxDB is the foundation for a number of InfluxData products including InfluxDB Cloud Serverless, InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated and InfluxDB Clustered.

In April 2023 the San Francisco-based company released InfluxDB 3.0 with a rebuilt database and storage engine that provides expanded time series capabilities across the company’s product portfolio.

Kinetica

Top Executive: CEO Nima Negahban

Kinetica develops a distributed, memory-first OLAP database that is designed to leverage GPUs and modern vector processors to boost the performance of complex queries across large volumes of real-time data, including temporal and geospatial data.

Over the last year Kinetica, based in Arlington, Va., has been incorporating AI and generative AI technology in its database to expand its natural language ad hoc querying capabilities, including adding ChatGPT in May for “conversational querying” analysis and then in September embedding a native large language model for running language-to-SQL analytics with enhanced privacy and security and greater fine-tuning capabilities.

MariaDB

Top Executive: CEO Paul O’Brien

MariaDB plc markets its namesake Enterprise Server relational database and the cloud-based MariaDB Managed Database, both based on the open-source MariaDB database.

While MariaDB plc’s database products are popular, the company (as distinguished from the MariaDB Foundation that manages the open-source MariaDB database itself) has struggled financially over the last year after going public in 2022. The company, with dual headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., and Dublin, Ireland, worked through two rounds of employee layoffs in 2023, issued a “going concern” warning in April, instituted a restructuring plan in October, and stopped selling products it considered non-core including SkySQL (spun off as a separate business) and Xpand.

In recent months MariaDB plc disclosed that it has received informal acquisition offers from K1 Investment Management and Progress Software Corp.

MongoDB

Top Executive: President and CEO Dev Ittycheria

MongoDB is one of the most successful of the new generation of database companies with its namesake document-oriented database and MongoDB Atlas, the company’s integrated suite of data services centered around a cloud database.

MongoDB’s focus is on providing developers with a platform for building data-centric and AI applications. The company’s database supports a broad range of tasks and data types including transactions, AI, edge computing, vector search, full-text search, operational data, streaming data, time-series data, geospatial data and graph data.

A major factor in MongoDB’s growth is the extensive strategic alliances the company has established with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba.

Revenue in New York-based MongoDB’s fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 31) grew 31 percent year over year to $1.68 billion.

Neo4j

Top Executive: CEO Emil Eifrem

Neo4j offers a graph database that stores data using nodes, edges and properties – rather than traditional tables or documents – and emphasizes the relationships between different data entities.

Neo4j AuraDB is the company’s fully managed graph database-as-a-service and Neo4j Graph Data Science is the company’s analytics and machine learning system.

In March Neo4j announce a collaboration with Microsoft to develop a unified data system, combining Neo4j’s graph capabilities natively integrated with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Azure OpenAI service, that combines structured and unstructured data to meet the growing data needs of generative AI applications.

Redis

Top Executive: Rowan Trollope

Redis (previously Redis Labs) develops the Redis in-memory NoSQL database and markets commercial versions of the database and related software and a fully managed cloud database service. The high-performance Redis database is most popular for developing real-time data applications.

Redis, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., also sponsors the source-available Redis database under the Redis Source Available License and Server Side Public License, a change from its previous availability under the open-source BSD license.

On March 21 Redis said it had acquired Speedb, which develops a data storage engine used to accelerate application performance across data caching and real-time use cases.

ScyllaDB

Top Executive: CEO Dor Laor

ScyllaDB develops the distributed, NoSQL database of the same name that’s designed for high-performance, data -intensive applications. The database is available in enterprise, cloud and open-source editions.

ScyllaDB is compatible with the open-source Apache Cassandra database and positions itself as a competitor to other NoSQL databases including MongoDB and Amazon DynamoDB. The ScyllaDB Enterprise 2024 1.0 release (unveiled Feb. 20) provided up to 50 percent higher throughput, 35 percent greater efficiency and 33 percent lower latency than the previous enterprise release, according to the company.

In October 2023 ScyllaDB, with headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Herzliya, Israel, raised $43 million in a new funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures.

SingleStore

Top Executive: CEO Raj Verma

SingleStore develops SingleStoreDB, a distributed, relational SQL database that supports both high-speed transactional and analytical workloads. SingleStore Helios is the company’s fully managed cloud database service.

SingleStore Pro Max, launched in January, is the company’s data platform for developing and running real-time AI applications. It offers such features as indexed vector search, an on-demand compute service for GPUs and CPUs, new change data capture capabilities for data ingest and egress, and a new free shared tier.

Tessell

Top Executive: CEO Bala Kuchibhotla

Tessell’s database-as-a-service platform is used to set up, manage, secure and scale relational databases in the cloud including Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Milvus and MongoDB.

Tessell says its platform, running on AWS and Microsoft Azure, can accelerate the migration of database workloads to cloud platforms and provide a unified control plane for managing databases across multiple cloud systems.

In January the San Ramon, Calif.-based company unveiled Tessell Database Lifecycle Management for Exadata@Azure, the latter the Oracle-Microsoft collaboration that makes the Oracle Database and Exadata services available directly within the Azure platform.

TigerGraph

Top Executive: CEO Hamid Azzawe

TigerGraph provides the TigerGraphDB graph database and graph analytics software, along with the TigerGraph Cloud graph database-as-a-service and GraphStudio graph analytics user interface.

Because graph databases show the relationships between data entities, they are particularly well-suited for such tasks as product and service marketing, customer 360 management, recommendation engines, fraud detection, anti-money laundering, and risk assessment and monitoring.

The most recent database release from the Redwood City, Calif.-based company introduced extended support for workload management, real-time data ingestion monitoring, Kubernetes and OpenCypher.

Yugabyte

Top Executive: CEO Bill Cook

The YugabyteDB high-performance, distributed SQL database is designed for running mission-critical, cloud-native transactional applications. Yugabyte Managed is the company’s fully managed database-as-a-service.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company also offers YugabyteDB Voyager for migrating data from other databases, such as Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL, to Yugabyte.

Yugabyte was founded in 2016 by three former Facebook engineers. The company’s name includes “yuga,” the Sanskrit word for “era” or long period of time.