Consolidation is a natural part of any industry’s maturation, especially a segment as fiercely competitive as the database space, which has witnessed a massive influx of new players in recent years each vying for their own slice of the market. The resulting overlap in products and capabilities is starting to claim its first victims.

The latest name to have been crossed off the list is InfiniDB Inc., one of the first of the new generation vendors that set out to rebel against Oracle Corp.’s database dominance. Founded as Calpont Corporation at the turn of the millennium, the company has developed a columnar store for distributing vast amounts of data across low-cost commodity servers.

The platform is geared towards performance-intensive analytical applications that require exceptionally fast response times and boasts Warner Music Group, British biotechnology powerhouse Genus plc and a number of notable companies among its users. A major advantage of the database over some of the other distributed storage solutions out there is that it employs MySQL to power queries, which eliminates the need for organizations to hire specialized talent in order to make use of the technology.

But that alone wasn’t enough to set InfiniDB apart from the pack. Vertica, the closest alternative in terms of functionality, became part of Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2011 and has lapped ahead with the hardware juggernaut’s resources at its back. To make it worse, InfiniDB also found itself competing against Couchbase, MongoDB and the countless other smaller non-relational databases that sprung up in the wake of the unstructured information explosion.

InfiniDB CEO Bob Wilkinson said in a statement that he and the rest of leadership team spent several months “exploring all possible investment options that could take the company forward” before making the decision to cease operations. He added that while the firm itself is shutting down, its namesake technology will live on as an open-source GitHub project.

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