It’s always an exciting sign of things to come when a big-name vendor rushes to buy a promising new startup before its technology even has a chance to hit the market. EMC Corp.’s purchase of DSSD Inc. two years ago resulted in the development of the world’s fastest flash array, and now Tableau Software Inc. is making similar waves with the acquisition of HyPer.

The outfit was founded in 2013 by two professors from the Technical University of Munich to commercialize an experimental database they created as part of a research project three years prior. HyPer’s architecture isn’t particularly out of the ordinary at first glance: It’s a relational system that keeps records in memory instead of disk to reduce the amount of time it takes to access the information and thereby improve query speeds. But while most of the other systems that implement the same approach can effectively perform only one kind of processing operation at any given time, it’s able to handle two.

HyPer claims that the system was shown to be capable of ingesting 100,000 transactions per second during an internal test while executing batch queries in the background with “very fast” response times. The capability removes the need to set up a dedicated database environment for each process as organizations traditionally had to do, which dramatically reduces hardware requirements. It also makes the work of administrators easier by doing away with the hassle involved in maintaining two separate systems that have radically different operational requirements.

One of the biggest maintenance chores that HyPer’s consolidated approach eliminates is the need to synchronize data from the transactional component to the batch analytics environment, a painstaking process that can take a considerable amount of time when a lot of records are involved. The fact that everything is running in the same place means users automatically have access to the latest information ingested by the system. Tableau will incorporate the functionality into its namesake visualization tool to facilitate the creation of more up-to-date and accurate graphs for customers who have until now been forced to use days-old metrics. 

The vendor could potentially also harness HyPer to provide the ability to visualize the massive amounts of data pouring into an organization’s network in near real-time. Tableau is announcing plans to open a new research center in Munich against the backdrop of the acquisition that will be tasked with exploring such opportunities.

Image via Geralt