StreamBase’s Stonebraker touts streaming apps

Mike Stonebraker has had a well-traveled career in IT, specifically in the area of data management. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational database, the Postgres object-relational database, and the Mariposa federated data system. He was founder and CTO of the Ingres, Illustra, and Cohera corporations as well as CTO at Informix and Required Technology. His latest project is StreamBase Systems, where he is founder and CTO. StreamBase is attempting to ride what it believes will be a great wave of need for high-speed streams-based data applications. Stonebraker recently met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill in Pacific Grove, Calif., to discuss StreamBase and recent goings-on with Stonebraker's previous projects. Stonebraker also provided his views on the open source phenomenon and Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft.

InfoWorld: What are StreamBase's goals?

Stonebraker: This is a commercialization of an academic prototype and Stan Zdonik, who's [professor of computer science] at Brown University, and I four years ago basically recognized it. If you want to do real-time stream processing such as Wall Street does bunches of, they're badly served by all [current] system software. So we set about building a new piece of system software from the ground up that's very good at inhaling fire hoses of incoming data and doing fairly complicated processing on it.

InfoWorld: You say it's system software. If it's not analogous to a database, what would it be analogous to?

Stonebraker: When I say system software I mean things like database systems, application servers, messaging systems. There are big differences between what a database system does and what we do. For instance, electronic trading is driving up the feed data rates on all the exchanges because the electronic trading systems are very good at probing the market. So data rates are exploding on Wall Street, trades are going up, and electronic trading says "Do it right now." And right now means millisecond response time, inhaling fire hoses of data. We have an engine that's good at this. We're [currently] selling most exclusively in financial services. We're a startup. We're a 25-person company. We're very well-funded. The financial services [industry] is willing to take risks on startups. They're willing to deal with new technology. Other places where there are big applications [for StreamBase] are in military and homeland security.

InfoWorld: Why those?

Stonebraker: We did a prototype that dealt with army battalion monitoring. When an army battalion is 30,000 humans and 12,000 vehicles, the army is deadly serious about getting a vital signs monitor on every one of the humans so they can do combat medical triage or [take other actions]. They already have a GPS system in every vehicle, but that didn't keep Jennifer Lynch's convoy from getting lost.

They want to turn this into a system to watch the position of every vehicle and compare it against where you're supposed to be. They also want to put a sensor on the gun turret. Together with position, that allows you to detect crossfire which is a big problem in Iraq. [Also,] they want to put a monitor on the gas gauge and figure out do you have enough fuel to accomplish your mission. It's this style of application which is large amounts of real-time data with real-time actions to take.

InfoWorld: StreamBase is not really transactional software, correct?