Groovy's SQL Switch: A Powerful Tool In The Quest For A Truly Real-Time Web
Groovy CEO Joe Ward stresses how important it is to make the distinction about what real-time really means, pointing out the fact that the vast majority of “real-time” content on the web really isn’t holding true to the definition of the term. Instead, he says most services are “near-time”, with delays that can range from a few seconds to a few minutes, which isn’t going to cut it as more and more of these services become integral to the way we use the web.
Ward also says that the key difference between near-time and real-time lies not only in the time lag seen with these services — after all, you can still get updates within a few seconds using the current methods — but in the way the current techniques interact with the server. Current methods of ‘real-time’ typically rely on frequent polling, where your browser continuously pings a server for any updates. This, Ward says, results in very high sever loads, with costs growing exponentially as the number of users increases.
Conversely, Groovy’s technique in the SQL Switch is akin to a ‘Push’ technology, where the server pushes the data without the need for the client to continuously poll for new information. This, in turn, leads to significant savings in server load by reducing the footprint on the application service fourfold, which also leads to a 20% saving in overall costs (you can see an estimate of the processing costs for the competing technologies below). The new software runs on special Intel boxes, with performance that the company says matches 100 standard SQL servers. For more, you can check out the full product spec sheet here.
Groovy offers a number of demos of the technology that are currently completing some final benchmarking, so you can’t try them out just yet, but they will be available here by the end of the week. Among them is a real-time Twitter client, which accesses Twitter’s API 20,000 times an hour.
Of course, it’s hard to tell just how powerful this technology will be until it’s actually released. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long: Groovy will be making its debut, with benchmarked stats, at next week’s AlwaysOn conference.
Disclosure: Groovy Corp was a sponsor for the TechCrunch Real Time CrunchUp.