rasdaman newsletter 05/2014

Rasdaman Company releasing Array Booster into Open-Source

Bremen, May 10, 2014 - The donator of the massively scalable open-source rasdaman Array Analytics engine, rasdaman GmbH, today announces the next substantial contribution: The performance-boosting direct file storage will be made available in the open-source rasdaman community. Of course, backward compatibility will be maintained: the new rasdaman version will smoothly run on existing databases.

"We wholeheartedly believe in open source, and we continue contributing to open-source rasdaman community all the time. We are glad that now we can provide this single major breakthrough in addition", says Peter Baumann, architect of rasdaman and CEO of rasdaman GmbH. "Several customers have expressed high interest in this feature. We love databases, but file-based analytics opens up scenarios where users decide not to run databases."

Until now, rasdaman stores its data in a PostgreSQL database. While this is operational in many places on this planet, a direct file-based storage can offer two distinct advantages. First, going directly to file is massively faster; preliminary tests show an improvement over PostGreSQL by almost a factor of two. Of course, PostgreSQL delivers good extra service, but if this is not needed (like often for satellite image archives) the new rasdaman storage will play out its full performance advantage.

A second advantage is simplicity: no PostgreSQL installation is needed, no database demon needs to run, so zero administration costs arise here.

One more time, this confirms the worldwide leading position of rasdaman in the rapidly expanding field of Agile Array Analytics. While research projects appear at the horizon, rasdaman remains the only fully implemented Array Database, operationally used on dozens of Terabytes.

Jacobs University maintains rasdaman community, supported by a worldwide community of contributors and the rasdaman company, which additionally offers the proprietary performance optimized version, rasdaman enterprise. As of this writing, rasdaman community is in its final steps for adoption by OSGeo Foundation. Further, it is the official OGC WCS Core Reference Implementation. In 2013, rasdaman has been awarded the prestigious Geospatial World Forum Innovation Award.