FoundationDB‘s team of ambitious founders are launching a new database that borrows from existing NoSQL and SQL databases, bringing developers “the best of both worlds.”

“When we started, we didn’t know this project was possible,” cofounder Nick Lavezzo said. “It seemed likely but also flew in the face of conventional wisdom.”

A bold undertaking, FoundationDB was developed from scratch in three-and-a-half years. It took a year’s worth of coding before the creators solved the trickiest technology problems and realized their vision for a modern database was a real possibility.

The founding team – Lavezzo, David Scherer and David Rosenthal – built FoundationDB to solve a personal pain-point.

Their previous venture, Visual Sciences, was acquired by Omniture for about $60 million in 2008. After the sale, they played around with various mobile and cloud projects. They saw that new developer tools and cloud-based services were gaining traction. However, when it came time to choose a database, they noted a lack of innovation.

According to Rosenthal, SQL databases have transactional integrity but are difficult to scale, and noSQL databases (such as MongoDB, Cassandra, Hbase and CouchDB) are highly scalable but have lost much of their transactional integrity.

They founders consider these NoSQL databases to be the primary competition. “Our competitors chose to create open source implementations of existing technologies (Google’s BigTable and Amazon’s Dyanmo) and they released their early products very quickly, and have been paying the technical debt ever since,” Lavezzo explained.

According to Lavezzo, developers today have to compromise when choosing a database, which don’t fulfill all their needs. “They they have the marketing head start on us, but we have a technology advantage,” he said.

FoundationDB’s secret? The founders have brought back “ACID,” a set of transactions developed in the 1970s that deals with the challenge of having multiple clients simultaneously read and write the same data.

Most of the newer NoSQL databases discarded ACID, leaving developers with fewer guarantees that database transactions were processed reliably.

So FoundationDB’s founders decided to incorporate the strengths of NoSQL (scalability), but integrate what they call “YesACID” to ensure their system won’t be taken down by a single point of failure.

The founders currently have 700 customers signed on to the alpha test, including Fortune 500 companies. They have secured investors and have poured their own money into the startup, but won’t reveal a figure.

When asked about the potential for acquisition (database as a service is a hot space; Rackspace just acquired MongoDB service Object Rocket), Rosenthal said they are in it long haul.

In the future, they plan to add features, and make FoundationDB more compatible with existing services and tools, so it functions as more than a database.

This will inform the business model — the pricing isn’t set in stone yet, but they plan to sell the database (although there will be a free option for early-stage startups), and offer professional consulting services for developer teams that want to add a custom layer.

“Our long-term vision is to be the data storage layer for modern systems,” said Rosenthal.

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On December 4th, over 1,000 MongoDB users and contributors will converge upon Santa Clara for MongoSV, a full-day conference dedicated to the leading open source, NoSQL database. 10gen co-founders and MongoDB core committers Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman will present the latest enhancements to MongoDB and share the product roadmap for 2013.

This year’s conference includes dozens of sessions by MongoDB developers, production users, community members, and 10gen ecosystem partners across six tracks. AOL, Apollo Group (University of Phoenix), foursquare, Github, Sailthru and more will present on their experiences deploying MongoDB in real world applications. In addition to many great sessions for developers, the agenda also includes a full track dedicated to operations for those interested in learning best practices for running large-scale MongoDB clusters.

MongoDB is the open-source, document-oriented database that is quickly reshaping the overall database market due to the popularity of its agile and scalable approach among developers and IT professionals alike. 10gen leads MongoDB development, supports the global MongoDB community and provides commercial subscriptions, support, consulting and training plus a free, cloud-based MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS).

Participating sponsors of MongoSV include Red Hat OpenShift, Microsoft, Softlayer, VMware, Joyent, Amazon Web Services, MongoLab, Fusion-io, MongoHQ, SwiftStack, Github, Mortar, Analytica, Zadara Storage, O’Reilly, and GigaOm.

Visit www.mongosv.com for full event details and to reserve your spot today.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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But the White House is definitely not doing business — or government, rather — as usual. The U.S. government has released a repository of open source code that allows citizens to create and vote on petitions, the same functionality that drives WhiteHouse.gov.

In September 2011, President Barack Obama made this commitment:

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool — called “We the People” — to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.

Today the White House fulfilled that commitment, as a repository of source code was made public on Github. The web application allows users to create accounts, log in, set up petitions, and vote. Petitions only go public when they cross a designated number of voters, and future development plans include streamlining, API development, a mobile version, and social media integration.

Interestingly, the developers and, presumably, the government chose the GNU General Public License, which Richard Stallman, long a proponent of completely free software, would approve. The GPL grants anyone the rights to use, study, modify, and redistribute software, which is one of the reasons Microsoft argued it was anti-American.

The application, titled Petition, is built on the Drupal content management system, and requires MySQL, MongoDB, and, naturally, PHP. Petition is in alpha, which is a very early stage of software development, but is currently in use already at whitehouse.gov.

Open source: You’ve come a long way, baby.

Image credit: White House/ShutterStock

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10gen, the startup that created the popular MongoDB open-source data application, has raised a new $42 million round of funding to improve its data-harnessing technology and build out its team.

The New York- and Palo Alto-based company generates most of its revenue by offering support, training, and consultation for MongoDB. Customers come from a wide cross-section of industries and include Foursquare, Disney, Viacom, eBay, Telefónica, and several governments across the world. The response from these customers has been tremendous, as the company has seen 50 percent quarter-over-quarter sales growth during the past five quarters.

There are quite a few similarities between 10gen and another big database startup, Cloudera, which has made a name for itself by developing and supporting open-source data platform Hadoop. However, MongoDB and Hadoop are used for different things and some customers use both data apps to help make sense of and manage their data.

“MongoDB handles real-time interactive queries, while Hadoop is used for analytics and data analysis,” 10gen President Max Schireson told VentureBeat. “MongoDB is fast and scalable on one hand and very flexible on the other.”

The major new round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from prior investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital, and Union
Square Ventures. The new round brings the company’s total raised to about $73 million.

“I’ve had my eye on 10gen and their amazing trajectory for several years,” said Harry Weller, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, in a statement. “They’ve solidified themselves as the dominate player in the NoSQL market and a real disrupter in the database space in general. The NoSQL market is exploding, and we see MongoDB becoming the de-facto database for both Web 2.0 companies and large enterprises.”

One other big thing the company will do with the funding is invest in new hires. The company has around 130 employees now, but Schireson said it intends to have at least 200 by the end of the year. It also plans to open an office in Sydney soon.

You can view a video outlining MongoDB below:

Photo credit: nokhoog_buchachon/Shutterstock

MongoDB is billed as a software set for managing large-scale databases for web sites. The software allows companies to manage their content and events, and also includes an analytics suite that tracks site usage.

Its users include a number of prominent startups like check-in service Foursquare and Bit.ly, which allows web surfers to shorten long links into more manageable lengths for micro-blogging.

The New York, N.Y.-based company launched MongoDB in 2007 and makes its money by providing commercial support for bigger businesses that employ the database software. It also manages the open-source community for the MongoDB software set that sees around 90,000 downloads each day.

Prior investors Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures also participated in the most recent round of funding. That brings its total funding up to $11.4 million. Flybridge Capital Partners led an earlier round worth $3.4 million, and Union Square Ventures led 10gen’s first round with $1.5 million in funding.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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