The most important new skills for business leaders are not what you might think. You’ve read the headlines. Data is the new oil; it’s the new currency; data capital can create competitive advantage. We also hear, over and over again, that machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are the future. Few will dispute that these things are true, but the trite language masks a deeper challenge. Data must be collected, analyzed, and acted upon in the right way and at the right time for a business to create value from it. ML and AI are only as powerful as …

MemSQL has been designed and developed as a distributed relational database, bringing the effectiveness of the relational database model into the new world of the cloud, containers, and other software-defined infrastructure – as described in a new report from 451 Research. Today, most of our customers run our software using some combination of the cloud and containers, with many also running it on-premises. Today, we are purveyors of the leading platform-independent NewSQL database. Having recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Federation, we’d like to take this opportunity to answer the question: “What makes a database cloud-native?” Cloud-Native Software Definition There …

In this blog post, the first in a two-part series, I’m going to describe pre-modern databases: traditional relational databases, which support SQL but don’t scale out, and NoSQL databases, which scale out but don’t support SQL. In the next part, I’m going to talk about modern databases – which scale out, and which do support SQL – and how they are well suited for an important new workload: operational analytics. In the Beginning: OLTP Online transaction processing (OLTP) emerged several decades ago as a way to enable database customers to create an interactive experience for users, powered by back-end systems. …