What Is InfiniDB?
InfiniDB is a column-oriented RDBMS primarily designed to handle the following application scenarios:
1. Data warehouses, data marts, and other business intelligence (BI) / analytic databases
2. Read-intensive segments of an overall application where read/search/lookup portions of the application are served by an analytic/query database and the transactional segments (e.g. order entry, etc.) are managed by a traditional relational database
In general, InfiniDB works well in any scenario where medium to very large amounts of data need to be queried and fast response times are desired.
InfiniDB is made available by Calpont Corporation. InfiniDB Community includes the following features and benefits:
| • | Column-oriented architecture: InfiniDB is architected in a column-based manner vs. a legacy row-based format, which means it is better suited for query-intensive situations. |
| • | Multi-threaded design: InfiniDB is multi-threaded and can make use of today’s modern hardware that is multi-CPU/core based. More CPU’s and/or cores allow InfiniDB to increase performance with no application modifications being necessary. |
| • | Automatic vertical and horizontal partitioning: In addition to being column-oriented, InfiniDB also uses a form of logical horizontal range partitioning that does not require special storage placement or schema design. Using both vertical and logical horizontal range partitioning allows InfiniDB to reduce I/O in both directions (column and row). |
| • | High concurrency: InfiniDB’s limits as far as concurrency is concerned are only restricted by the server machine’s capabilities; no theoretical concurrency limit exists. |
| • | High-speed data loader: To load large amounts of data, a high-speed load utility is made available. |
| • | DML support: In addition to supporting the high-speed bulk loading of data, InfiniDB supports full DML (insert, update, delete) operations as well. |
| • | Transactional support: ACID-compliant transactional support is provided along with deadlock detection. |
| • | Crash recovery: InfiniDB provides full crash recovery capabilities. |
| • | MVCC design: InfiniDB supports multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) or “snapshot read” so query operations are never blocked on a table. |
| • | No need for indexing: Because of InfiniDB’s transparent use of both vertical and logical horizontal partitioning, there is no need for indexing. |
| • | Low Maintenance: In addition to removing the need to index tables, InfiniDB also doesn’t require other objects such as materialized views and summary tables to achieve fast performance. |
| • | ALTER TABLE is supported (add, drop). |
| • | Platform Portability: The popular distributions of the Linux operating system are supported. |
| • | Logical Data compression: InfiniDB uses transparent logical data compression to store data that benefits from being compressed. |
| • | Performance diagnostics: To help tune performance, InfiniDB supplies SQL analysis and tracing tools to help troubleshoot poorly running SQL. |
| • | MySQL front end: InfiniDB utilizes MySQL for its basic user interface. This allows anyone familiar with MySQL to become immediately productive with InfiniDB. |
| • | Runs on commodity hardware: No special hardware is needed to run InfiniDB. |
| • | No licensing fees: InfiniDB Community is free for all to use. |
| • | BI Tool Compatible: InfiniDB uses standard MySQL Connectors and should support all BI tools that are compatible with MySQL. |
Calpont also offers InfiniDB Enterprise for those seeking enhanced performance, MPP scalability and formal production support.
