RethinkDB Raises $1.2 Million For Its Database For Solid-State Drives
Solid-state drives — the kind of disk that you’ll find in your iPhone — likely represent the future of storage. Not only do SSDs do away with the moving parts associated with traditional platter based drives; they’re also fast. RethinkDB is looking to be at the head of the curve by offering a fully optimized MySQL storage engine that takes advantage of the benefits offered by SSDs. Among the features listed on their site: append-only algorithms, lock-free concurrency, and live schema changes (you can see more technical details here).
There’s obviously risk involved with trying to redefine how people structure their databases (this seems like the sort of thing that will either never gain traction or become very successful), and the company’s strong roster of investors represents a big vote of confidence. Update: Actually, as the comments point out, RethinkDB is meant to be easy to deploy. RethinkDB plans to use the new funding to add developers to its still-small team.