TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: EXASOL PEEK UNDER THE HOOD

Exasol was founded in Nuremberg, Germany, in the year 2000 – a time when two trends in hardware were starting to emerge:

• Major improvements in processing power were no longer coming from ever increasing clock speeds of central processing units (CPUs), but instead from parallel and distributed systems.
• After a long period of slow improvement, random-access memory (RAM) started becoming much larger and cheaper with each successive generation.

With backgrounds in high-performance computing and scientific computing, Exasol’s founders recognized that new opportunities were made possible by these trends. With RAM falling in cost and rising in capacity and cluster computing being merely a commodity, it was now conceivable to apply the principles and architectures of high-performance computing to database design.

In the years that followed, the company exclusively focused on delivering ultra-fast, massively scalable analytic performance. Today, successful companies around the world rely upon Exasol’s innovative Loading...in-memory analytic database solution to run their businesses faster and smarter. The company’s flagship product, Exasol, is a high-performance Loading...in-memory database designed specifically for analytics.

Exasol holds performance records in the TPC-H online transaction processing benchmark from the Transaction Processing Introduction Performance Council (TPC) for decision-support databases, outperforming competitors by orders of magnitudes and scaling up to hundreds of terabytes of data.

The goal of this paper is to offer a deeper understanding of a selection of design principles, core features, and technologies that underpin Exasol’s analytical performance and, at the same time, take a glimpse at what Exasol has to offer beyond raw performance.