Analysts welcome ACID transactions on real-time distributed Aerospike

The little database company with big users gaining fans as it adds consistency to speed and scale

With its 8.0 release, distributed multi-model database Aerospike has added ACID transactions to support large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP) applications in a move it claims is an industry first.

Analysts have backed the release, saying it overcomes a "significant challenge" among distributed NoSQL databases.

Aerospike is a fully in-memory database that supports key-value, JSON document, graph, and vector search models. It began as Citrusleaf in 2010, rebranding as Aerospike in 2012 before going open source under Apache and AGPL in 2014. A commercial Enterprise Edition is also available.

It uses the concept of namespaces, akin to tablespaces in a relational database. Within the namespace reside sets, which are like tables in a relational database.

Aerospike may not be well known. Stack Overflow's 2024 survey did not rank it among the top 35 databases used by developers. DB-Engines ranks it 61st overall. However, it counts multinational corporations such as PayPal, Barclays Bank, and Airtel among its customers.

Following the Aerospike 8 release earlier this month, founder and CTO Srini Srinivasan told The Register that when NoSQL databases started, the idea was to compromise on consistency in order to provide higher performance.

"That was 15 years ago. Over time, every one of these NoSQL databases has added strong consistency features in transactions. Aerospike is focused very heavily on performance at scale. In 2018, we had a strong consistency release for single record operations, and with Aerospike 8 what we have is proper transaction support. This is classical transaction support, which has been around for 30 or 40 years in databases. We added that feature without compromising on the performance, especially for single operations. The performance continues to be the same as it was before this release."

Some customers were achieving close to 100 million transactions per second on the distributed system, he claimed.

Noel Yuhanna, VP and principal analyst with Forrester Research, said Aerospike was well-known for powering high-performance real-time applications.

"A significant challenge with NoSQL distributed databases has been maintaining data consistency across the cluster, which is why many products support 'eventually consistent' databases. However, Couchbase, MongoDB, and YugabyteDB do offer distributed multi-document ACID transactions across clusters. With this announcement, Aerospike empowers customers to run transactional applications in a distributed environment while ensuring strong consistency, an important milestone for Aerospike customers. This provides a compelling value proposition, especially given its attractive TCO, making it an even more appealing choice for more businesses."

Use cases have started with applications designed to detect fraud across global banking systems, for example, but have spread to gaming, mobile payment systems, and live sports betting.

Henry Cook, Gartner director analyst, said Aerospike's claims about ACID compliance and distributed performance at scale were credible, and there was growing demand for applications that need this kind of performance.

"As we implement more distributed systems on a global basis, there is a need to support a globally consistent picture of the state of that system. This may be a common status for the underlying global database content, or to provide globally consistent metadata that describes the data and user status."

Gartner senior director analyst Aaron Rosenbaum said other databases with similar kinds of performance might include CockroachDB or YugabyteDB, which use a PostgreSQL front end and a distributed back end. Meanwhile, hyperscale databases such as Amazon DynamoDB, Azure CosmosDB, and Google Spanner also play in the same category.

The only downside to such a specialist high-performance database might be the size of the vendor.

"Some of the databases come from smaller companies, and therefore, companies need to weigh up any dependency upon them," Rosenbaum said. "However, the ease of management of the offerings from the hyperscalers is accompanied by lock-in to their cloud and product. Balancing the flexibility of deployment of independent vendors vs the simplicity of management of the hyperscalers is a challenge across data management, especially in this particular segment where distributed access is so powerful."

Aerospike closed $109 million in VC funding in April last year and $30 million in growth financing in December. Yuhanna said the company was close to breaking even. ®