ServiceNow, which is still keen on compiling features in its Now platform, revealed its third purchase in 2021. After taking over California APM expert LightStep and Indian RPA publisher Intellibot ServiceNow, ServiceNow is about to purchase Berliner Swarm64. The two companies did not disclose the amount of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2021.
Swarm64 was founded in 2013 and focuses on developing management and optimization solutions dedicated to open source PostgreSQL databases. Before attracting ServiceNow, the company may have persuaded some investors. According to data from Crunchbase, it has raised a total of US$21 million in two rounds of financing. The B round was led by Intel Capital in 2018. After Xilinx was acquired by AMD, it was also interested in this startup because of its FPGA-compatible technology.
Swarm64, the designer of PostgreSQL turbo
About 30 Swarm64 employees listed on LinkedIn are dedicated to developing and distributing two products. The first, Swarm64 DA, was designed as an “extension of PostgreSQL” to speed up analysis and transaction database queries. Since the launch of version 5.0 in December 2020, Thomas Richter, the co-founder and CEO of Swarm64, praised the product’s HTAP (hybrid transaction/analytic processing) capabilities. According to him, it allows the capacity of PostgreSQL to be increased to the same ranking and Oracle, SAP HANA and MemSQL databases (SingleStore) are the same.
This benchmark test (built on a TCP-H repository with 300 GB files and 12 scenarios) is said to be based on the same machine (EC2 R5 8xlarge instance) in its version 13.3 that shows that query performance is 1 to 28 better than the standard PostgreSQL database in real time Double use 32vCPU, limited to 128GB RAM). For the same request, various tests tend to show lower RAM consumption and lower disk usage. Swarm64 DA mainly relies on CPU instructions. The secret to starting a business? According to its documentation, parallelization and rewriting of queries, selection of the right instance/hardware, and compression of column storage indexes.
The second product, PG Nitrous, is just a packaged version of PostgreSQL 12 combined with Swarm64 DA, which associates different templates to deploy the database and this query acceleration engine on AWS. Since the product is accessible in the cloud provider’s market, Swarm64 promises to request “5 to 60 times faster.”
The Berlin publisher warned that its expansion aims to accelerate the processing of data sets larger than 10 GB, “problematic queries that take one second or more to execute”, and analytical processing involving “large amounts of data.”
Joe Davis, Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering at ServiceNow, wrote in a press release: “Swarm64 provides a combination of analysis and transaction database functions, supports large-scale intelligent processing, and provides our customers with world-class performance and scalability. .”
Speed up analysis processing…and migrate to Postgres
Despite this extensive discussion in the industry, people should not forget the mentality behind the ServiceNow acquisition. Leaders reminded many times that in addition to adding capabilities on a unified platform, the most important thing for publishers is to recruit experts in a field. Swarm64 has verified this again. The third product of Swarm64 is the “engineering service” used to optimize the performance of the company’s internal PostgreSQL database.
Although improving RDBMS performance is interesting in itself, PostgreSQL is an alternative to Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft databases in many organizations.
According to the May 2021 developer survey released by StackOverFlow, PostgreSQL is the second most popular DBMS for developers after MongoDB. In addition, it remains fourth in the DB-Engines ranking, second only to Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Swarm64 itself positions its offer in this direction (one of the webinars is called ” Goodbye Oracle, hello Postgres »), but it can also be used as a replacement for existing data warehouses including Netezza, as well as a catalyst for IoT use cases and time series processing.
In terms of performance optimization and database migration, ServiceNow is not alone. In addition to cloud providers that are particularly aggressive in these areas, Nutanix, a hyper-converged expert, also relies on its Era solution. But we should expect a kind of “co-competition”: Swarm64 is already a technology partner of Nutanix, HPE, AWS, Azure, Intel, Xilinx and OVH. It remains to be seen how ITSM experts will embed Swarm64 DA and PG Nitrous into Now.
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