SAN JOSE, CA, June 17, 2009 – SYSTAP, LLC, a boutique software consultancy, announced today that its open-source, distributed RDF database “bigdata®” has broken through significant barriers in semantic web database size and throughput, loading 12.7 Billion RDF statements with peak load rates of up to 300,000 statements per second and sub-second query times. This is the highest throughput rate reported so far anywhere in the world.

“We are very excited about the results we are seeing” says Mike Personick, SYSTAP principal and co-architect of bigdata®. “We are consistently seeing test runs of over 10 Billion statements, and we are just now starting to see throughput rates that get us to 1 Billion statements in under one hour. You cannot touch performance like that on a single machine for anything near the same cost. Commodity hardware is cheap and scale-out approaches let you make the most of it.”

Bryan Thompson, the lead architect of bigdata®, has been testing and tuning the RDF database on a 15-blade commodity cluster since early January. “Theoretical scaling limits are meaningless,” says Thompson, “Until you run the numbers you can’t be certain how a database will react to very big data sets.”

RDF is a Semantic Web technology and W3C standard for encoding knowledge into statements or “triples”. Personick: “RDF databases are ideally suited to on-demand federation and semantic alignment of heterogeneous data sets in a world with no universal schema. What makes these results so exciting is that our customers can now tackle these sorts of problems at very large scale.” Mr. Personick will be speaking about bigdata® at SemTech 2009 in San Jose, CA.

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