From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the rationale behind relational database at this point?

Eric Frenkiel: That’s a great question. In fact, it’s one of the first questions our investors asked us, “Why are you building a relational database? The entire world is going to NoSQL.” We had a very contrarian view at that time, which was that the world will remain SQL. We have proven time and time again with every new vendor effectively reinventing the wheel with SQL. You cannot analyze your data if you do not have SQL access.

To get to the real point, everyone knows SQL. It’s a universal language. It’s lasting power is going to be measured in centuries. We have a tremendous belief that it is the easiest way to analyze your data which is why it’s been the most successful implementation for any database over the last 40 years.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve provided an explanation as to why relational versus NoSQL but what about relational versus object-oriented because we are dealing in a rich media universe.

Eric Frenkiel: Building an object-oriented database is something that exists now and it has a certain use case for certain aspects. At the end of the day, what makes relational databases work is, it immediately orients us to how we think of people. That’s the relational component. There are some really great articles about how next-generation, post-Facebook social networks have tried to build using Mongo but they all failed because at the end of the day, a relational database can provide object linkage with better transactional consistency. It’s not that object-oriented databases shouldn’t exist, it’s just that valuable data will ultimately be structured and belong in a relational system.

Sramana Mitra: Speaking of use case, what are your core uses cases?

Eric Frenkiel: We believe that the world is getting faster. There are more devices and more people online. There’s a larger need for access to data quickly because everyone is in a rush. We need to be able to react at the same degree that a Facebook or Google could serve their data out. The value proposition that we offer to our customers is the ability to let their business go real-time and respond to their business without having to wait. Most businesses today don’t have that ability to respond in real-time. They might have a batched ETL process that loads data overnight into a data warehouse and they’re looking at old data. They can’t respond to the customer in time.

We believe that by giving our customers a real-time technology like MemSQL, they can become more data-driven and outperform their competitors by responding to live data and changing the business as it evolves. It’s a new capability relative to what you might have seen in the classic analytics market around batched processing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel
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