Databases

Florida State U Adopts Adaptive, MySQL-compliant Database

• By Leila Meyer
• 03/09/16

Florida State University's (FSU) Research Computer Center has adopted an adaptive, MySQL-compliant database to help researchers accelerate queries on complex data sets.

"FSU supports hundreds of researchers on widely divergent projects, but the one thing they have in common is they're not database experts," said Paul Van Der Mark, interim director of FSU's Research Computing Center, in a news release. "Researchers who use MySQL say it's much too slow, especially on complex data sets, but they don't know how to tinker with databases and don't want to — and shouldn't have to — learn."

The center implemented deepSQL, an adaptive database from Deep Information Sciences. "deepSQL solves the slow-database problem that other technologies have struggled with, and failed at, for so long," said Van Der Mark. "The more complex the research, the more the database accelerates."

The database has helped "speed researchers' queries by up to 1,000 percent, streamline analyses and provide a new database-as-a-service offering without having to retrain its staff," stated a news release from the company. Although the university currently runs deepSQL on bare metal machines, it has the option of running databases in physical, virtual or cloud environments.

Before implementing deepSQL, staff at the Research Computing Center didn't promote the use of databases to support researchers because of the performance and usability issues with the old database, but now researchers are using databases more because it's easy for them to work with complex data sets. "It's incredibly easy to use and its auto-tuning does all the heavy lifting without going offline — all of which streamlines and speeds analyses, and thrills our researchers," said Van Der Mark.