TransLattice gobbles StormDB upstart for Postgres threesome

PostgreSQL specialist TransLattice has devoured database-as-a-service (DaaS) startup StormDB for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition was announced on Wednesday and will let TransLattice marry two strands of Postgres together, which could yield some new technology for the wider open-source database community.

It represents some consolidation in the young and unproven DaaS market, and StormDB's small development team will all go to work for TransLattice, we understand.

"This is a superstar team in distributed databases [who were] one of the first contributors to the Postgres-xc project," TransLattice's chief technology officer Michael Lyle told El Reg. "It's great to have them on board. Each of the two products here are better at different kinds of database workloads."

TransLattice makes the TransLattice Elastic Database, which automatically partitions SQL tables into rows or columns which are then redundantly stored across the available compute infrastructure. The system follows some of the principles of Google's huge Spanner database, though it lacks the time-stamping feature which gives Spanner the edge in write locking.

StormDB previously delivered a Postgres-XC database-as-a-service, which it billed as a good system for OLTP write-intensive workloads, jobs requiring MPP parallelism, and the underlying datastore for multi-tenant cloud services.

Lyle said the buy is "a great opportunity for TransLattice to pick up a lot of code to run lots of workloads much faster".

StormDB had created several proprietary extensions to PostgreSQL and Postgres-XC that - we're told - provided increased reliability and scalability, and good responses to complex queries.

"TransLattice will continue to offer code contributions and support to Postgres-XC, Postgres-R and the greater PostgreSQL community," the company wrote.

But mating the disparate systems will not be easy, and will require some sustained development work. TransLattice expects to show off the fruit of its acquisition in six months or so, we understand. Given the whopping $150m that MongoDB-experts MongoDB Inc raised recently, there are signs that the database market is beginning to thin out. So, 2014 looks to be a crucial year for upstarts like TransLattice. ®