Database Startups X, Y, Z: The Latest from Xata, Yugabyte, and Zilliz
What's in a name? These three Bay Area companies, respectively, are driving extended data types, data that lives forever, and "zillions" of unstructured data.
Hello Cloud Database Report people! Today I’m providing updates on three cloud database startups—Xata, Yugabyte, and Zilliz—that are driving innovations in very different areas of the market.
I’ve become acquainted with each of these companies over the past year through conversations with their founders: Xata CEO Monica Sarbu, Yugabyte CTO Karthik Ranganathan, and Zilliz CEO Charles Xie.
Before I get into the details, here’s a little backstory on how these companies came up with their unique names.
Xata, in addition to being a surname in some parts of the world, is a play on the words extended data. Which means “a database that supports extensive data types like images, links, attachments, etc.,” explains Monica Sarbu.
Yugabyte translates roughly into data lives forever. The moniker is a spin on the Sanskrit word “yuga” which refers to an age of civilization, or millions of years. “Data needs to be protected and accessible forever,” Karthik Ranganathan told me.
Zilliz is a neologism (i.e. made-up word) and a palindrome that stands for zillions of zillions. “We use it to show how much unstructured data we are trying to sort through,” says Charles Xie.
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Now, here are updates on each of these companies.
Xata
Long-time readers of the Cloud Database Report will recall my profile of Xata, a startup with an impressive list of financial backers and a unique leadership team. Not only does Xata have a female founder and CEO—Monica Sarbu—but the company’s entire board is comprised of women.
The details are here on the company’s website.
Those facts alone make Xata a noteworthy company, but its recently introduced Serverless Database Platform is the real differentiator, with its design around extreme usability.
“It includes popular and battle-tested databases like PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch and reduces the glue code that you need to integrate these services and replicate the data between them, as well as the amount of expertise that you need to use and operate these services,” explains Monica Sarbu. “Advanced free text search and aggregations are available over your data from day one, without you having to integrate another service.”
“Xata is vertically integrated and comes with an advanced TypeScript SDK and a user-friendly admin UI to easily work with your schema and data. It supports branches natively, making it the perfect data companion for platforms like Vercel or Netlify.”
How are early adopters using Xata? The winners of the company’s application-building challenge give us a view into the possibilities. They include the ishn.xyz link shortener, and apprendamos.com, which is billed as the first social networking platform built on Xata.
There’s also Thoughtnaut, described as a journaling companion to help “explore your mind.” It does that with a prompt that asks simple questions like: How do you feel today? And, What would you like to accomplish today?
As you can see, Xata allows for some fresh thinking in how cloud databases can be used. For background, here’s my original blog post on Xata.
Yugabyte
Yugaybte this week announced availability of YugabyteDB Voyager, a platform and tools to facilitate database migrations to its PostgreSQL-compatible cloud database. Voyager is an essential set of capabilities as Yugabyte builds and expands within enterprise accounts, which it is clearly doing.
Database migrations can be complex and take many months. Suda Srinivasan, Yugabyte’s VP of marketing, says some large enterprises have migration strategies that involve hundreds of databases and extend years into the future. “Part of the challenge that companies have is managing this at scale,” he says.
YugabyteDB Voyager is designed to streamline the complete lifecycle of database migrations. It can be used to plan and migrate hundreds of databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other target databases from AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Yugabyte has outlined a five-step migration process: Plan, Assess, Migrate, Finalize, and Cutover. The basics include inspecting the database schema and data; exporting the schema and data; performing schema modifications as necessary; and testing the destination database. More advanced capabilities—such as continuous optimization and the ability to “fail forward”—are planned.
You can view details on YugabyteDB Voyager here.
Yugabyte is a Cloud Database Report Top 20 company. The company recently released YugabyteDB 2.17, with new features for business continuity, failover, and backups.
Below is a link to my original blog post on Yugabyte, which includes my podcast conversation with co-founder and CTO Karthik Ranganathan.
Zilliz
I recently had an informative conversation with Charles Xie, founder and CEO of Zilliz, a vector database startup. I owe a big thanks to Charles for meeting me near the San Francisco airport for the interview, after I was forced to miss our scheduled call due to a last-minute change in my travel plans.
Zilliz is an early-stage startup that is commercializing Milvus, the open source vector database project for which Zilliz is lead sponsor and developer. Early adopters of Milvus include Ebay, Ikea, and Nvidia. Xie says there may be as many as 1,000 organizations using Milvus.
Vector databases manage vectors, which are long strings of numbers representing documents, images, and other data types used in machine learning apps.
2022 was a big year for Zilliz, which was founded in China but has opened an office in Silicon Valley. In August, the company announced that it had raised $60 million in Series B funding, bringing total investment to $113 million.
In November, Zilliz launched is managed cloud service, Zilliz Cloud, on AWS. Plans call for Zilliz Cloud to be offered on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in the first half of this year.
Xie recently shared his thinking on the emergence of vector databases in a byline column published by Venture Beat.
“Some technologists have extended traditional relational databases to support embeddings. But that one-size-fits-all approach of adding a ‘vector column’ table isn’t optimized for managing embeddings, and as a result, treats them as second-class citizens,” Xie writes. “Businesses benefit from purpose-built, open source vector databases that have matured to the point where they offer higher performance search on larger-scale vector data at a lower cost than other options.”
You can read Xie’s byline article on the Venture Beat website here.
Finally, I asked Xie what’s in store for 2023. As I already mentioned, Zilliz plans to make Zilliz Cloud available on Google Cloud and Azure. In addition, the company is looking to expand and build engagement with the Milvus open-source community.
“Vector databases,” says Xie, “are still a new thing.”