If you polled small to midsize tech teams on their biggest database headaches, cost would be at the top of the list — without question. If you haven’t already run into this, the number one reason (and complaint we hear all the time) is hardware.

Hardware is pricey. And time consuming to implement, plus there’s a learning curve — all of which create problems for most of the companies we come across where the primary concern is instant database scalability to meet user demands.

Echoing this, Boris Livshitz, Sever Data Lead at AppDynamics, a ScaleBase customer, explained what drove the company to seek out a new database scalability solution to SearchDataManagement.com:

From the [AppDynamics] founder all the way down, everyone had been asking for an architecture that can scale, and our customers had been asking for an architecture that would scale because they would see performance problems. They want to instantly scale and they want to make sure that we can instantly scale along with them.

And what was the hold up with most of the solutions they tested?

It’s the hardware that really makes it expensive, and you can’t really negotiate that stuff.

So where did AppDynamics turn?

AppDynamics first began looking into database sharding technologies about a year and a half ago, when it became evident that the company needed to scale its MySQL implementation with the needs of its customers — and that continuing to throw hardware at the problem would eventually become prohibitively expensive.

For some companies, throwing new, expensive hardware at the database to increase performance is fine — but for others, like AppDynamics, and web 2.0 entrepreneurs looking to get their venture off the ground, it just isn’t a viable or strategic option.

We’re watching the database industry evolve faster than ever and there are sky high expectations from users for immediate access to applications.

Here’s what we offer: No hardware installation. No changes to existing infrastructure. Instant scalability and the ability to adapt to dynamic business environments.