July 15, 2022

ICYMI: Highlights From SingleStore [r]evolution 2022

Abhinav Srivastava

Director of Product Marketing

Three hours of content, two role-specific tracks, and one product that customers ❤️.

Did you miss our Summer 2022 product launch event? We totally understand — and we’ve got you covered. Here are the nuggets you don’t want to miss from each session and break out track. There’s something for every person who builds with or leverages data systems in any way.

ICYMI: Highlights From SingleStore [r]evolution 2022

For everybody (who cares about data systems)

A real conversation about real time. In this thought-provoking keynote, SingleStore CEO Raj Verma explains his vision for real time — Why real time matters in our lives, what makes a system real time and the technological convergences that make such systems possible. He describes how SingleStore plays a role in creating real-time experiences for all kinds of customers across multiple industries. Raj shares how SingleStore plans use our latest, $116M round of funding to further advance our product roadmap across analytics, distributed SQL and the developer experience. Finally, Raj shares his stance on the issues affecting our world today, and SingleStore’s mission and dedication to making things better.
A first look at new SingleStoreDB features. SingleStore’s SVP of Engineering Shireesh Thota shares a high-level view of the expanded product capabilities in SingleStoreDB across three key areas: enterprise scale, developer experience and real-time analytics. Prominent features for each of these areas include: Workspaces, Code Engine Powered by Wasm and Flexible Parallelism.
Workspaces allow customers to scale dynamically by creating environments, each with their own isolated compute resources. Code Engine Powered by Wasm makes it possible for developers to safely and efficiently port over external code libraries (C, C++, Rust) into SingleStoreDB. And Flexible Parallelism allows customers to use all the cores on their machines to process a single query, improving query performance — potentially 4X faster, per our own estimates.
A demo that’s simply wow. Next, we see a phenomenal demo of SingleStoreDB in a gaming setup, the Wasm space program. In this demo, Carl Sverre shows us how SingleStoreDB does three things: handles both transactions and analytics at scale; supports massive concurrency for thousands of users; and is extensible with custom logic/ programs with our Code Engine Powered by Wasm.
What is Wasm, and why would you want to use it? Bailey Hayes answers these questions and spices up the Wasm space program demo by introducing additional strategies (processes) in real time — without interrupting existing processes.
Why did we create a feature called Workspaces, and what is it? Micah Bhakti explains that with Workspaces, customers now have isolated compute instances for workloads. Works great if you’d want to scale individual applications (or workloads) up or down. You don’t even need to move data to create read replicas. We also walk you through creating Workspaces, so you can see how easy it is to attach a shared database to multiple workspaces.
Easier connections for modern applications. If your application is often accessed via an unstable connection (like on a mobile device), you’d want to know more about Data API, a native HTTP API for running SQL operations on SingleStoreDB. Julie Price explains in detail where such content aware, dynamic or stateless connections make sense — and that Data API can be used with virtually any client (web browser, mobile or server based).
What direction are we steering SingleStoreDB toward? Head of Product Yatharth Gupta shares his vision for advancing SingleStoreDB as a single database that serves the growing needs of all our customers. This vision has four cornerstones:
1. Distributed SQL(Geo-distributed, scalable, intelligent apps that rely on usable, durable data)
2. Meet developers where they are (APIs)
3. Zero-trust-based database security (compliance certifications)
4. Petabyte-scale analytics (JSON analytics, materialized views, analytics on very large sets of data)

For Developers and Data Engineers

What does it take for a database to power real-time apps and analytics? Stock trading signals, IoT applications, fraud detection, recommendation engines. All of these use cases require real-time systems. In his keynote, Adam Prout mentions five key technical capabilities for a real-time database: Low-latency streaming data ingestion; Flexible Indexing; Strong analytical support for complex queries; Separation of storage and compute; High Availability and Disaster Recovery. The crucial element here really is Flexible Indexing, or what we call Universal Storage.
Toys for developers. Flexible Parallelism, new Vector Functions, JWT Authentication and more. Our Director of Product Management Eric Hanson provides a quick overview of 10 cool features we think you’ll love.
Workspaces. Did you know SingleStoreDB allows not just separation of compute and storage, but also separation of compute and compute? Luis Neves demonstrates creating and querying Workspaces with a sample trading dataset.
Code Engine Powered by Wasm. While User Defined Functions (UDFs) are a common way for databases to add custom logic to queries, using UDFs restricts your language options to just MP-SQL (SingleStoreDB’s custom dialect). With Code Engine Powered by Wasm (Web Assembly), logic written in C, C++ and Rust can be ported into your database so it’s closer to the data and to compute resources.
Peter Vetere explains design considerations for using Wasm in SingleStoreDB and demonstrates how an external program (Whatlang, a Rust library for language detection) is ported to SingleStoreDB. As of this writing, we believe SingleStoreDB is the only relational database in production to integrate with Wasm.
Data transformation and analytics engineers. dbt Labs is changing the game for real-time analytics with a data transformation workflow for SQL data pipelines, from development to deployment. In this session, Amy Chen, Partner Engineering Manager at dbt Labs and Julie Price talk about the SingleStoreDB dbt Adapter, which allows analytics engineers to more easily connect to SingleStoreDB.
MindsDB CEO Jorge Torres paints his vision for machine learning. Open source and in database. To prove the execution against this vision, Jorge demonstrates how housing prices can be predicted within SingleStoreDB using the MindsDB platform for machine learning.

For IT and Business Leaders

Data-intensive applications. In this keynote, Chief Innovation Officer Oliver Schabenberger highlights key aspects around data intensity — what makes an application data intensive, its measurement, key use cases and contrasting two approaches to solving for data intensity. If you’re interested in measuring your applications’ data , check out our Data Intensity Calculator.
Better together — IBM and SingleStore. In today’s world, we expect that any answers we need will be available in real time. Chris Zobler, VP of Data and AI at IBM, speaks with Oliver about IBM’s Data Fabric architecture that unlocks access to all data while ensuring its governance and trust.
IoT and cybersecurity at scale. Scott Kuffer, COO and founder of Nucleus Security, and Benjamin Rowe, Cloud and Security Architect at Arcules share with Yatharth how their companies address customer challenges around data security. Arcules assessed SingleStoreDB’s speed and scalability across three dimensions: ingestion, storage and queries. Nucleus wanted to scan millions of vulnerabilities a day, while also being able to analyze this data and quickly serve the analysis to their end customers.
What’s next for cloud databases? John Foley, Editor of the Cloud Database Report and Shireesh discuss three important trends in the world of cloud databases:
1. Convergence of relational/ non-relational, distributed, OLTP and OLAP databases
2. Real time not just for applications, but for analytics
3. Growing complexity with several hundreds of databases and other data management tools out there
Data-intensive applications at Siemens and impact.com. Christoph Malassa discusses Siemens’ analytical use cases and how with SingleStoreDB, Siemens is now able to get real-time analytics with sub-second response times. Similar to Siemens, Mauricio Aristazabal of impact.com explains how SingleStoreDB allows the company to achieve real-time analytics — and the new product feature they’re most looking forward to trying.
The fintech revolution. Dendi Suhubdy, CEO, Bitwyre and Michael Zimberg, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Asset Research speak with Domenic Ravita about why real-time data and analytics matter for their fintech companies and how they’re powering applications such as cryptocurrency trading and asset pricing with SingleStoreDB.