Talk about old meets new. Splice Machine Inc. raised $9 million from investors this week to fund the development of additional features for its relational database, which follows the tried-and-true formula of structured record management with one notable exception: Information kept inside is not stored on some legacy storage engine originally created decades ago, but rather Hadoop.

Splice Machine has taken advantage of the economic way in which the framework distributes data across commodity hardware to make its platform four time cheaper than Oracle Corp.’s dominant alternative. The startup is able to handle queries more efficiency as well by making use of the specialized processing technologies available for Hadoop. Simple requests like pulling all the information in a certain range (e.g. the email addresses of every lead between the ages of 25 and 45) are relegated to HBase, while more complicated operations are executed using Spark.

The result is between ten and twenty times faster processing than Oracle Database, according to Splice Machine. That high performance comes in addition to all the usual bells and whistles that organizations have come to expect from their relational systems, most importantly ACID-compliance. Its adherence to the reliability standard enables the platform to challenge the competition for even the most sensitive workloads, including financial applications, a feature that likely contributed to Wells Fargo & Company’s decision to invest in the startup three months ago.

Added up with this week’s newly announced funding round and its previous venture rounds, Splice Machine has raised about $31 million in funding to date. Chief executive Monte Zweben said that besides expanding the capabilities of his firm’s database, he also plans to invest the capital in expanding customer acquisition efforts.

Image via Geralt