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Hi Eric!

Not sure if you remember me, but we spoke several (5?) years ago when you guys first started. I was the SAP HANA guy and I think we were talking about the landscape of in-memory solutions back then. First off, congrats on the success so far. Second, a few questions:

- How is MemSQL comparing to HANA and Vertica? My understanding is that MemSQL provides the same infrastructure (columnar in-memory based storage) of those solutions but will run on commodity hardware (HANA for example is hardware-vendor locked).

- One of the interesting topics that has come up in the HANA space is that it's expensive to maintain and scale. Specifically, provisioning new servers for data growth and archiving old data out of memory. Are these issues present at all in MemSQL?

- Lots of your customers seem to be using it for company-specific strategic solutions. Are any using it for operations? (like financial close reporting, or as a transactional DB)




Of course we remember you. Please stop by our new office!

You are right about the commodity hardware. The other difference with HANA is that MemSQL rowstores are in memory for high throughput applications and columnstores can be stored or flash or disks. So it's economical to scale MemSQL to very large datasets.

- MemSQL is very easy to scale. It comes with an ops dashboard that lets you add nodes with just a few clicks.

- There are a lot of different use cases. Some companies use us for operational reporting, end of day financial reporting, high throughput counters, real-time risk analysis, etc


I might take you up on that! Shoot me your contact details so I can set up (just did a search on my emails and can't find anything). My contact is in my profile.

Thanks!


eric at and nikita at memsql.


Cheers!


"but will run on commodity hardware"

We run memSQL 4.0 on 18 machine cluster, all commodity hardware. It is awesome.




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