MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the forefront of database technology for more than 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres database and his Postgres database and helped launch many companies including Streambase Systems (which he acquired by Tibco in 2013), VoltDB, Tamr, and SciDB. Now 80 years old, he knows a thing or two about database technology and starting a company.
His latest project, DBOS, puts the database at the center of the software stack and reduces the operating system to a small kernel of low-level functionality. In today's data-centric world, he believes Linux has not kept up with the scale and speed needed to process large amounts of data in the cloud. So, as he has done throughout his illustrious career, he researched and developed the latest technology. He responded to modern data requirements and of course started a company.
Today, DBOS officially launched with a seed investment of $8.5 million.
Stonebraker, the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, says the startup is the culmination of a three-year collaborative research project between Stanford University and MIT. had some brain power). “The origins of the project were in OLTP (online transaction processing), but database systems have gotten much faster over the past 15 years, so the hypothesis was that it would be competitive as a new operating system stack.” he told his TechCrunch.
He was interested in placing database systems at the bottom of the technology stack, as close as possible to the bare metal where operating systems typically reside. Bare metal is a term used to describe a pure hardware layer with no software present. Swapping the OS and database is a bold and innovative idea.
He says his vision for the company really came together after seeing a talk by Databricks CTO Matej Zaharia (who will become a co-founder and advisor to DBOS). At Databricks, Zaharia realized that as data volumes scaled to heights never seen before, a new way of thinking about the software stack was needed. “As we continue to build services that support database clouds at Databricks and scale to millions of concurrently running workloads, one of the things we've discovered is that we can actually make things database-centric. “It's much easier,” he said. He explained.
This reinforced an idea that had been forming in Stonebraker's mind: tasks traditionally performed within the OS using the C++ programming language could instead be performed within the database using SQL queries. I started thinking about methods. It's no surprise that the operating system guy was horrified by this concept, but so far he's been able to build file, scheduling, and messaging systems on his DBOS by running his SQL queries. I did. Additionally, he tested it with a major bank and a consumer food company. These operations were traditionally handled at the operating system level.
“We've proven that we're comparable in performance compared to what you're doing now. So that gave us the courage to keep moving forward,” Stonebraker said. Ta. One of the great things about this approach is that you can take advantage of the database's logging capabilities to keep a record of all operating system events for as long as you like.
“So if a ransomware attack started 12 minutes ago, you can just back up everything for 13 minutes and get around the issue and get back up and running almost instantly.” The experimental project was launched last year by a company called DBOS. became. His current product set includes three main parts: autoscaling serverless and an open source SDK that allows developers to generate and test code locally before deploying it to his cloud. A time travel debugger (the ability to move the OS back and forth in time) also runs on the cloud service.
Stonebraker acknowledges that companies aren't going to completely change the way they run applications, so the startup aims to create a more green space for today's established companies to take advantage of this new approach to organizing software. Targeting field opportunities. More established companies may consider moving specific parts or new projects to his DBOS, he said.
Since Mr. Stonebraker and Mr. Zachariah have fulfilling day jobs, running the company is more difficult, but it is certain that Mr. Stonebraker in particular has a wealth of management experience. He hired his CEO to run day-to-day operations, and the company currently develops products with a team of eight engineers.
The $8.5 million seed investment was led by Engine Ventures, with participation from Construct Capital, Sinewave, and Gutbrain Ventures.