Florida State U Adopts Adaptive, MySQL-compliant Database
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.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].