infoTECH Feature

June 23, 2015

Free Your Data

AgilData CEO Dan Lynn’s presentation on the main stage of Cloud Expo NYC starts off with a black and white video clip of Bruce Lee explaining the agility of water. He says with his indelible charm, “Water can flow or it can crash.  Be water my friend.”

Afterward, I met up with him to talk about how he and his team are changing Big Data for Fast Data with an Agile (News - Alert) approach to stream processing.

Lynn noted, “The database is always a bottleneck impending the agility of application innovation, and AgilData’s is taking this problem head on with a new scalable stream processing database with SQL that’s simple to deploy.”

AgilData may be their new name but it’s a rebranding of Codefutures, which was started by people who made highly performant data pipelines for Wall Street and the gaming industry. Today, its mission remains the same: changing the way we look at databases and lowering the barrier of entry to get into Big Data.

AgilData looks at the data base through a prism of four S’s. According to Lynn, a database must be Simple, Scalable, Streaming and support SQL. A simple data base will add value without being overly complex. Scalability allows a firm to grow and adapt to changing needs and company initiatives. Lynn illustrates, “all data is streaming, the world is streaming, that’s how the world’s data actually is, it is just that our systems aren’t capable of handling it”—while this can be difficult for many solutions out there today, it is necessary. And finally, SQL, which everybody already knows about, is not just extensible but “expresses what you want not how you want to do it.” Lynn proclaimed, “SQL brings great power.”

A perfect use case to illuminate Lynn’s point is applications that are data driven, such as online leaderboards for social gaming.  Those of us that play fantasy sports can relate to non-responsive scoring—constantly seeking up to the second scoring, but the system can’t aggregate the data every time it reloads. The database simply cannot keep up.

Lynn explains that there was no way to offer a seamless experience, and AgilData is a company making great strides in the provision of real-time data to the user.

Every company must have a partitioning and sharding strategy, but it could be a huge waste of money. As most people don’t accept this undertaking until they become successful because by then, he points out,  the rigidity of the database has begun to slow down changes in applications.

In addition On Demand schema changes allow developers to apply Agile principles to the data infrastructure, accommodating new schema needs driven by new features in the application without compromising the consumers of the previous schema.

Lynn and his team are committed, as he closed: “We need to stop letting the application roadmap be held hostage by your relational database. Instead treat the data as dynamic streams. Free your data from the tyranny from the database and let it flow like water.”

AgilData is a company to keep an eye on, as many believe stream processing is the next frontier of Big Data.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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