Whether it’s creative content or business records, data is piling up on us faster every day. Amazingly though, current database products are still being driven by technology standards from the pre-Internet era. Which means that data-centric businesses, and other businesses who find themselves pursuing data-centric opportunities, are demanding something more.

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Imagine, for the sake of illustration, that you’re part of a new startup company that aggregates web content and does a lot of value-adding.

The company busily integrates gigabytes of data from various sources, analyzes it, then makes it available via search. There are three engineers: two working on an app, and one on data (administered with the ‘help’ of MySQL). A standalone machine processes incoming data, then feeds it to the database.

But there’s a problem…

Time goes on, you ingest more data, add new sources, etc. Soon, your database response times are getting longer for no apparent reason. Downtime is more frequent. Two more engineers come aboard to tune up the DB and rewrite some code.

Uh oh. Users are complaining. Management is sweating, and suddenly they’re paying attention to the data infrastructure.

$100,000 later, a state-of-the-art server arrives, and after some migration panic things are back to normal.

The business gets more popular, users demand more features… In a few months, the database is crawling again. Even more engineers are brought in and the whole dirty cycle starts again.

But that’s just the way it goes, right?

The Drawn to Scale Platform is designed to give companies room to grow. We discovered that Internet-scale software can be lean, fast, and even easy to use — all vital factors in building better systems that last. We believe in providing simple interfaces and controls, not SQL black magic (though we may support SQL in the future), and our platform offers seamless scalability to handle any peaks or spikes. We even provide a custom toolset that makes management and migration of existing data easy.

Traditional database servers are mature. They’re well understood, and well supported. But they also have performance ceilings most people won’t hit early on. This makes choosing them conventional wisdom, and a safe bet. But hit that ceiling and quite literally no amount of money will save you. Twitter learned this the hard way in 2008, and had to start over again. Not all companies survive such a rewrite.

My cofounder and I started Drawn to Scale so companies can move fast, developers can build incredible apps, and so no-one has to stay up late kicking database servers into shape.

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The result of all this is that you can now focus on building your business and applications, instead of spending precious resources maintaining and building infrastructure.

You don’t have to fight with your tools any more.

…let’s learn more!

Why are we doing this?

Our motivation comes from knowing that Internet-scale businesses need 100% agility and 100% presence, but existing solutions don’t really offer that. As a result, Drawn to Scale’s platform is:

• ready to build with from day zero
• built to run on commodity, cheap hardware
• able to scale out and resize on demand on the cloud or in your DC
• manageable by humans(!)

Just put your data in, and query it. It’s that easy.

Indestructibly lightweight storage

Data wants to be useful. But to be useful it has to be stored safely and turned around quickly for immediate, random access. To do this we use Hadoop and HBase, a fast and reliable storage tech that captures data of any type or size. Our implementation of HBase is self-managing and also super forgiving when it comes to organization, so it puts old-style “schemas” right back where they belong (ie yesterday).

Here’s an illustration of the kind of command we use to make data persistent and available:

Table.put(Column,ColumnFamily, Data);

Everything else that happens, like search preparation and backup, is helpfully automatic. Just send and go.

Optimized for the queries that matter

Software evolves fast because good ideas travel. Standardized form controls, standardized web page layout… over time certain patterns just rise to the top and stay there because they work. Database handling is no different. Regardless of how new and amazing an app might be, it’s likely the fundamental building blocks are familiar and constant.

Consider for a moment what you typically do with your data. It’s likely, if you’re maintaining any sort of web app or dashboard, that the vast majority of operations will be in the following list:

1. SELECT
2. GROUP BY
3. COUNT
4. SUM
5. Filtering/WHERE
6. A few others

The Drawn to Scale platform is fast and easy precisely because we made it to reflect this reality. We’ve created an indexing engine and query language specifically to do this one handful of things extremely right — things that common practice has proven to matter. Exactly what you need, and no more.

Search that doesn’t discriminate

Those operations we mentioned? They work just as well on raw text as they do on pre-structured data. Which means you can easily mix structured and unstructured data together and search or browse by attributes, the same way you might discover products at Amazon.com or Newegg. To achieve this we use search products like Lucene and bobo-browse, adapting them as part of a scalable architecture.

This combined directory/search ability — known as faceted search — also makes sense for web content aggregation, because it allows for related items to be pulled from non-uniform sources.

Availability in changing conditions

Data isn’t particularly useful if you can’t serve it on time. So as your data volume grows, or the number of hits on it increases, our platform can spin up additional server resources to balance out the load. The sky’s the limit when it comes to simultaneous requests (although we do recommend adding caches  to your apps wherever possible). And when traffic isn’t spiking, that extra capacity can come back to us and be saved for later.

What’s the value?

We believe in working smarter. By using a platform that addresses real requirements, you’re making more money and spending less of it. Your company gets to be moving faster and building what it needs to survive, and you’re freer to be a better developer, manager, or CEO.

We’re extremely excited to be rolling out this product over the coming months. To know more or become an advance customer, drop us a line on this form.

Want to see more info in a video? Check out this link and vote for “Drawn to Scale”.