You probably haven’t heard of the newest database startup in In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio, but if history is anything to go by, there’s more than a good chance you will. Consisting almost solely of big names such as Cloudera Inc. and MongoDB Inc., the exclusive club of analytics vendors to have acknowledged receiving funding from the intelligence community’s venture capital arm now includes MemSQL Inc. as well.

The three-year-old Y Combinator graduate offers a unique database that combines an in-memory row store with a columnar system to enable heavy-duty transaction processing and real-time analysis of unstructured streams in the same environment. Since other solutions only support one capability or the other, organizations have historically had no choice but to use a different product for each use case, which required paying for more software licenses and hiring extra staff to manage the added complexity that comes with multiple offerings.

MemSQL promises to do away with that operational headache and help budget-strapped IT organizations free up more resources in the process. The startup’s namesake platform abandons the traditional appliance-centric approach to database design for a distributed architecture not unlike Hadoop’s that splits up workloads across low-cost commodity servers. To top it off, the column store component of the software is optimized to take advantage of flash storage, which makes it suitable for powering even the most latency-sensitive analytical applications.

The multipurpose nature of MemSQL complements a wide range of use cases, the startup highlights on its website, from real-time advertising to infrastructure monitoring. But absent from the list is the reason that In-Q-Tel presumably decided to make the investment: the database’s capacity for handling raw intelligence.

MemSQL not only provides a means for rapidly ingesting that kind of fast-moving and varied information but also eliminates the need to perform time-consuming ETL (extract, transformation and load) operations in order to make the different types of incoming data accessible for analysis. Removing that bottleneck can make it possible to act on information much faster than in traditional environments.

Staying true to its secretive nature, In-Q-Tel didn’t disclose how much funding it placed into MemSQL, only revealing that the investment will “generate market opportunities for its in-memory distributed database with government entities.” The funding was announced in conjunction with an update that introduces geo-distributed replication, performance improvements to the column store and the ability to import large volumes of data from Amazon Inc.’s S3 object storage service as well as traditional file systems.