Severalnines makes the Top-33 Hottest Tech Companies List in Sweden

Sweden is a country with a strong culture of innovation, and is at the forefront of technological development. There are many great examples, for instance that small piece of software that many people use to make free internet calls, or that cool little web service that many use to listen to music. Perhaps not surprising, since the Swedes are some of the world’s fastest people at adapting to new trends and ideas.


So it was with great pleasure that Severalnines was selected in the ‘33-listan’, a list of the top 33 young tech companies in Sweden. It was organized by Ny Teknik, Sweden’s leading technology newspaper. Companies on the list were from different areas, including high-tech, clean-tech and bio-tech. The organizers put together a great event in central Stockholm that had about 500 attendees.

Congratulations and lots of success to everybody who made the list.
As a young company ourselves, we know it takes a lot of hard work to build a tech company.
But boy ain’t we all passionate about changing things, making things better?

As Thomas Edison put it: There’s a way to do it better – find it.

Game Over for NoSQL? Discussing Databases in Online Social Gaming

According to VentureBeat*, games companies raised a record-breaking $1.54 billion in funding last year and social gaming accounted for over half of that. No wonder everyone wants to have a piece of that pie!

With the arrival of social network platforms, the gaming industry has seen an explosion in casual and social gaming. The social gamer represents a massive audience that cuts across all age, gender and demographic boundaries. Online social games are some of the most demanding applications in the world, with millions of users, stringent response times, complex simulation models and billing requirements. Games take years to develop for a reason ...

Online social games are data-driven applications, and databases are central to these applications. However, there is no single database architecture that will fit the different types of data that the application needs to store. A data management architecture needs to account for the diversity of data, and optimize for some of the differences in the datatypes. E.g. it is ok to lose leaderboard data during a game as it can be reconstituted, whereas billing data needs to be 100% ACID.

Therefore, with the generous contribution of Joshua Butcher, we just published a whitepaper that discusses the different types of data stored for various functions in social gaming. We will see that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to database architecture, and suggest a sharding strategy based on schema partitioning.

With our new whitepaper, we’re also starting a discussion on what the database of choice might be for anyone wanting to develop online social games. With so many NoSQL databases now available, one might wonder why MySQL would be a good database choice for the gaming industry. To find out, download our whitepaper today!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this blog below or reach out to us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter or directly via these contact details.

* http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/06/deanbeat-game-companies-raised-a-record-breaking-1-55b-in-2011/

MySQL Cluster is a brilliant NoSQL database

MySQL Cluster* is one of the most advanced and scalable databases available today and, despite what its name might suggest, it is also a brilliant NoSQL database**.

Let me discuss this statement!

First, let’s discuss the high level issues that NoSQL databases try to address:

-     Scalability. Traditional RDBMS technology was designed four decades ago, and is not appropriate for today’s Big Data requirements. Database systems today need to be able to scale horizontally over multiple machines to handle millions of users. As the CAP theorem states, it is not possible to achieve availability, scalability and consistency in one system. Several NoSQL databases sacrifice consistency for availability and scalability.

-     RDBMS has a rigid data model. Once a normalized data model has been defined in an RDBMS, it is difficult to change. Schema operations on a database are often not online, and what’s worse, they can be slow. This makes them hard or impossible to implement on production systems. NoSQL databases do not require fixed table schemas, they are ’schema-free’ and can more easily store unstructured data.

-     Simple APIs to access simple data structures, rather than SQL. Joins are not used, they introduce complexity and performance bottlenecks, especially in distributed scale-out systems.

Now, let us have a look at how MySQL Cluster stacks up against these requirements.

-       In terms of scalability, MySQL Cluster scales in a horizontal fashion across a number of nodes. Currently, up to 255 nodes are supported in one cluster. Data is automatically partitioned across a number of Data Nodes, and it is possible to configure a number of replicas for each data partition. Synchronous replication ensures that replicas are consistent and an XA transaction model also makes transactions consistent across partitions..

-       MySQL Cluster has a relational data model, and programmers do have to normalize their data into tables. But the great thing is that schema updates are online, such as adding/removing tables or indexes, or changing existing tables (e.g. adding a column to a table).

-       MySQL Cluster has an Access Layer that can consist of MySQL Servers (SQL), LDAP (NoSQL), native C++ API and Java API (both NoSQL). In the upcoming 7.2 release, a Memcached API (NoSQL) is now also available. So, there are plenty of NoSQL APIs to choose from in order to access NDB data.

Looking at the above, it seems that MySQL Cluster has the problem of having a relational data model where programmers still have the problem of normalizing their data.  A schema-free database sounds great from a developer’s point of view, however, I wonder how it would be to operate a schema-free database. How would the users do ad-hoc queries and analysis?

                                            “Just throw it in the database!”

If a relational schema is something that a user needs or is at least willing to accept, then MySQL Cluster is a brilliant NoSQL database. It solves the same problems as the new NoSQL databases do, yet you also get the traditional benefits from the RDBMS world: atomic transactions even for complex transactions, consistency, integrity and durability, possibility to do complex analytics using multiple columns and indexes. See also this excellent comment by Henrik Ingo about how some of the world's largest telco companies are using MySQL Cluster.

For the majority of NoSQL database products out there, these fundamental data management concerns of an application are being moved out of the database layer to deliver very high performance and scalability.  This means that we are moving these fundamental concerns up the stack in the application layer. I wonder how many out there would feel comfortable with that. What do you think?

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this blog below or reach out to us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or directly via these contact details.

* Maybe NDB Cluster is a more appropriate name? MySQL server is an SQL connector.

** Although with a relational model at the back.