Let’s say you run a company and you’re trying to get more people to visit your Web site. Your advertising agency comes up with an idea for a YouTube video with a tiny pig pulling your company’s product in a tiny wooden wheelbarrow. The video ends with a screen shot of your company’s logo and web site.

Before the YouTube video is posted, your web site functions nicely handling 100,000 visits a day. But the little pig YouTube video goes viral and suddenly your web site is getting two million daily hits. Your web site crashes since it can’t handle all the volume — instead of getting more potential customers to learn about your company, you get embarrassment.

ScaleBase’s products are built to make sure that if your company uses a database such as MySQL, it will automatically scale to meet the spikes in user demand, so that your company can turn that increased traffic into new customers.

ScaleBase does this by “scaling-out” the database so that businesses — such as customers Autodesk, AppDynamics and Mozilla – get the benefits of scaling their databases to meet increased demand — without adding hardware to their existing infrastructure and or re-writing their applications.

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Apple did it. Amazon did. So did Pinterest.

In the past six months, all three sites went down – at the wrong time – because their databases couldn’t keep up with consumer demand. In every case, unplanned peaks in user traffic pounded the site, and brought performance to a screeching halt.

In this new world of immediate experience and gratification, the database is rapidly becoming the company. Consider Amazon and Pinterest: There’s no storefront, no customer service – they live and die based on each user’s experience. More than ever, that experience is backed every step of the way by data, which means that the dark corners of data performance risk are becoming a bet-the-company vulnerability.

If your data isn’t killing your database today, it will. Maybe next month; maybe next year.

To add a little perspective, one of the largest wireless providers in the UK – O2 – is currently spending close to $20 million in an effort to replace its database following two recent outages that impacted millions of customers. Derek McManus, COO of O2 UK wrote in a blog post that the company is, “…extremely disappointed to have let our customers down again.” He adds that O2 UK is “…not prepared to risk this happening to our customers for a third time and are implementing a proven alternative solution.”

On the flip side, you can get ahead of this chase for big data. It may mean rethinking how big databases are built for growth, because the underlying assumptions of predictable behavior are obsolete.

For just about every company, managing and exploiting the potential of ‘big data’ will be the #1 business opportunity before 2013 is out. Even if your database doesn’t seem like an under-performing asset today, it could easily become one within two or three quarters.

The biggest issue is performance – and staying ahead of the tidal wave of transactions. That’s especially challenging when the ‘conventional wisdom’ about big data points to the importance of analysis. Indeed, it’s the analysis that can be mined for sentiment, patterns, and, once you can decode it, predictability, new opportunities and money.

But it’s the transactions that underlie this intelligence. And it was the breathtaking volume of transactions that caused Amazon, Pinterest and Apple to go dark. Simply too much unexpected activity, likes, posts and uploads. And that – like it or not – is the future of big data. Peaks. Valleys. And not always when you expect them.

Avoiding this mineshaft is, surprisingly, possible. It’s not expensive, either. But it does mean toppling a few sacred cows.

For example, companies like Mozilla – which recently launched an online app store – are putting database scalability and performance systems and solutions in place before they build or launch new apps – in order to guarantee the company will be able to support its anticipated transaction volumes. 

Size matters. But not the way you think.

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During last weekend’s frenzied holiday shopping, online retailers pushed the limits of their databases. The strain looks likely to continue during the next four weeks, as retailers continue to promote discounts and incentives in virtually every combination possible.

One way online retailers can prepare for those stressful traffic loads, and handle seasonal jumps in activity, is to optimize their databases. I spoke with Paul Campaniello, vice president of global marketing at ScaleBase, to discuss how the implementation of practices, including distributed databases, can help prevent ecommerce disaster.

SPfR: The holiday season is in full swing. Cybersales were up this year. Have performance expectations changed in recent years?

Campaniello: Performance is critical. So much of what we do is making sure [performance goals are met]. Today, there are many next-gen apps out there — not the traditional Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft — but apps like Facebook and Twitter, which are Web based. Our solution is built on MySQL DB, just like Facebook.

SPfR: What do solution providers need to be mindful of when working with retail customers?

Campaniello: What happens when everyone, for example, goes to Zappos and clicks on the same pair of $400 Jimmy Choo shoes? You click into or out of the cart, and you “get the hourglass.” If you “get the hourglass,” that’s a database issue. When you try and optimize a transaction, what you’re really trying to manage is the scale and flow, power and speed of the communication between the application and the database.

SPfR: Some might wonder, why not over-provision? Better safe than sorry, no?

Campaniello: We just did a Webinar and talked about SPRAIN pain: Scalability, Performance, Relaxed consistency, Agility, Intricacy, and Necessity. The idea is that when you stretch a database beyond its normal capacity, SPRAIN will stretch the database. You can solve the problem by throwing hardware at it. But if you don’t look at ways to scale your database, you’re not fixing the underlying problem. You want to find a way to scale your database.

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ScaleBase, a Newton, Mass.-based startup that helps companies keep fast-scaling databases up-and-running, today announced that it has landed $10.5 million in series B funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners, with participation from its existing investor, Cedar Fund. Having raised $4 million from Cedar in 2010, the investment brings the startup’s total funding to just under $15 million.

As scores of new web and mobile apps launch every day, increasingly companies are finding themselves working overtime to manage the intense processing requirements of big data and struggling to preserve up-time. For this reason, ScaleBase sees a big market opportunity for any company offering uninterrupted database performance solutions.

Being able to deliver realtime scalability obviously can have a big effect on application performance and has the benefit of reducing over-provisioning, which has the tendency to eat holes in the company coffers.

While it’s an auspicious problem for a company to have, exploding user bases and, in turn, significant increases in data production require companies to move fast to scale their databases. Naturally, processing these transactions can be stressful and ridiculously challenging depending on infrastructure and available resources.

More established players had to create ad hoc, internal solutions to solve these problems, but not every company is fortunate to have the available capital that scaling demands. That’s where ScaleBase comes in. As one might expect, high-growth and increasingly active spaces like online gaming and digital media represent big market opportunities for the company.

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Another day, another database company on my radar. This one’s a little different, though.

ScaleBase, a Newton, MA, startup that is trying to enhance the capabilities of existing databases, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. Previous investor Cedar Fund also participated in the round, which brings ScaleBase’s total funding to about $15 million.

The startup also announced a new CEO as of today, Ram Metser, who joined ScaleBase as executive chairman in June. Metser, the former CEO of Guardium (acquired by IBM in 2009), succeeds Doron Levari, the founder and now chief technology officer of ScaleBase.

In the IT world, it seems everyone and their brother is trying to develop software that makes database systems (such as MySQL) more scalable and able to handle the explosion of queries and transactions coming through new Web and mobile apps. ScaleBase does this by taking a virtualization approach to managing database loads, so that businesses can still use their existing infrastructure and applications. That’s the idea, anyway. Its big customers include Autodesk and Mozilla.

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Newton startup Scalebase, whose software aims to enable Web firms to rapidly grow their databases, on Wednesday announced a $10.5 million Series B round that includes new backers Bain Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. The two Boston-based venture capital firms were joined by existing backer Cedar Fund of Israel and Waltham in the round, the company said.

Scalebase also announced that its new CEO is Ram Metser, formerly chief executive of Waltham database security firm Guardium, acquired by IBM (NYSE: IBM) in 2009 for a reported $225 million. Metser had served as executive chairman at Scalebase since the spring.

The company was founded in 2010 by Doron Levari, who’d held the CEO role and is now the firm’s CTO.

In an interview, Metser said Scalebase’s middleware is targeted at companies with explosive growth in both their creation of data and the size of their user base. Those companies face challenges around scaling their databases to process all of the transactions, and can see their growth held back as a result, he said.

“Companies like Facebook had to deal with this problem before Scalebase existed, so they solved the problem with internal resources, and invested a lot,” Metser said. “We are solving this problem for the next companies that are like that — that have massive data growth, and growth to hundreds of thousands of users very quickly.”

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MySQL database management tool ScaleBase virtualizes MySQL database, spreading database load into smaller bite-size chunks

As an open source company, Mozilla developers make a lot of different versions of software code each day, and part of Sheeri Cabral’s job to keep track of them all: which ones work, which don’t, how many times they’ve been downloaded, and which have a bug that needs to be fixed.

To do that, the makers of the Firefox browser have a MySQL database, the common open source structured database system, which organizes the information in a table format. A few months ago Cabral, who is a database administrator and architect for Mozilla and a MySQL community contributor, began running into issues as the database grew to over 100GB. “If that database doesn’t work, the downloads aren’t available,” she says, emphasizing the importance of the database.

Typically the solution to such a problem is to throw more compute capacity at the server housing the database, or potentially switching from hard drive spinning disks to solid state drives, says Paul Burns, an analyst at Neovise. But Cabral found a different solution: Instead of having this one single database, Mozilla has in effect virtualized its database by splitting it up into a group of clusters, each holding a portion of the database. Using technology from a company named ScaleBase, now when a query is made the ScaleBase software identifies the cluster where the data is stored so that the entire database doesn’t have to be searched. This speeds performance without adding additional hardware. “This is not an easy thing to do,” Cabral says, “but they seem to have done it and it’s working.”

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Summary: Organizations need to compile and hold larger amounts of data. Many big data tools are useful when the goal is discovery and analysis of that data. What needs to be done if a transactional system needs access to a huge, rapidly changing data store.

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AppDynamics picks ScaleBase for sharding over Clusterix

Find out why application performance management company AppDynamics chose ScaleBase over the other scaling/sharding technologies.

Scalebase was recently mentioned in Paul Burns article, ‘Shard’ Your Database & Speed Analytics Processing, on All Analytics.com

Check around, and you’ll see a small but growing number of companies — as well as open-source offerings — that deliver various types of sharding support. Some companies provide automatic sharding, which removes the difficulty of partitioning a database into shards. ScaleBase, for example, provides automated sharding and a platform that isolates applications from any changes. This means analytics applications can take advantage of sharded databases without any code changes.

Read the full article to learn more about database sharding and how this technique can help boost performance of your analytics environment.

Take a closer look at Mass High Tech’s recent ScaleBase article: ScaleBase ramps up sales, expects new funding

Wow. Our launch was picked up by many news sites. Here’s just a partial list. Thanks guys.

• BusinessWire
• CWCS
• Diversity
• DowJones (Subscription required)
• DZone
• Finanznachrichten
• Information Week
• ITCode
• SaasChronicles
• Sys-con
• TheRegister
• TMCNet