“Apple has bought a start-up company that makes super quick database technology,” Eric Zeman writes for InformationWeek. “The acquisition of FoundationDB points to Apple’s desire to smooth out some of its software services, which have a knack for being flakey.”
“What probably caught Apple’s eye is FoundationDB’s ability to parse ACID-compliant transactions at an enormous scale,” Zeman writes. “According to TechCrunch, which was first to report the acquisition on March 24, FoundationDB offers licenses for 480 cores (via AWS) complete with 24/7 support for $150 per hour. It can complete about 54 billion writes per hour.”
“With no official word from Apple about how it intends to fold FoundationDB into its own offerings, speculation has focused on its cloud-based apps and services,” Zeman writes. “Peter Goldmacher, who works for FoundationDB competitor Aerospike told the Journal, ‘This type of database technology lets companies process information at high speed without incurring the typical huge costs for computer servers and the people to run them. FoundationDB’s technology could boost the efficiency of Apple services like iMessage, which delivers text messages, and iAd, which places digital ads on mobile devices.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier, this technology could also be useful for any Internet TV plans Apple might have. Think “iTunes’ Genius feature for TV” and beyond!
Related articles:
Apple buys into big data? – March 25, 2015
Apple acquires FoundationDB, durable database company – March 24, 2015
Apple is having a hard time with Cassandra DB as it needs lot of tweaking to make it scalable in iCloud world. Their s/w is so bad, they can’t migrate to cassandra 2.0+. Hence it is good to have own DB to customize to apple business need. Not a game changer but gives lot of flexibility to fine tune.
I’m looking forward to seeing what impact this has on CloudKit-based applications.
-jcr