MemSQL bods develop new transaction: $35m now in-pocket

The in-memory former-Facebook database jockeys at MemSQL have taken in $35m in valley lucre.

The series-B funding round was announced on Wednesday and saw Accel Partners lead an investment round in the database technology.

MemSQL's in-memory database is designed to run on scale-out commodity hardware, and pulls off various tricks to cut the time its system takes to parse a query. It supports structured and semi-structured data, and admins can use SQL to query JSON data.

The company was founded by former Facebook engineers Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov in 2011. Since then it has notched up a few prominent customers, including Comcast, Zynga, Verisign, and stock-photo emporium Shutterstock.

MemSQL is one of many new relational (and non-relational) databases vying to unseat incumbent technologies from stalwarts like IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Most of these new databases have either been built by employees of some of the early-2000s breakout consumer internet giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, or by people trying to sell to these companies.

What all of the new technologies have in common is a reliance on cheap servers and no special prescriptions for equipment (although in MemSQL's case you need to have a sufficient amount of RAM for your dataset).

This can let companies save on capital expenditures, but does tend to expose difficult management interfaces or unfamiliar techniques to its users, which can occasionally yield problems.

"There is a very distinct place for MemSQL in real-time analytics," wrote Accel Partners's chap Kevin Efrusy in a canned statement. "No executive wants to wait for insights any more, and MemSQL’s in-memory, SQL technology means they don't have to." ®