Clustrix

» see clustrix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never had a database problem that one machine could not solve. That is my distance from this one, and it doubles as an exact description of the market Clustrix needed and mostly could not find: companies whose transaction volume had broken MySQL and who had not already paid an engineer to shard it by hand. That gap is where just under seventy-two million dollars of venture funding went.

Paul Mikesell and Sergei Tsarev founded it in San Francisco in 2006, and it came through Y Combinator under the name Sprout-Clustrix. Mikesell had founded Isilon and run its engineering through to the EMC purchase, and the Clustrix CTO, Aaron Passey, came out of Isilon too, so the pedigree was distributed storage people attacking a distributed database. The pitch was a shared-nothing SQL database that kept its ACID guarantees while splitting and rebalancing data across nodes, with nobody deciding by hand where the rows went. It was sold as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Sequoia and US Venture Partners led a $10 million round in December 2010, with more arriving through 2013. Gigaom named AOL and Photobox among early customers, and by 2018 MariaDB was claiming 25 trillion transactions a month across the installed base.

MariaDB bought the company on 20 September 2018 for an undisclosed amount, its second acquisition of that year after MammothDB in March. ClustrixDB became MariaDB Xpand at some point before July 2020, and no source gives the day that rename took effect. After that it shipped inside MariaDB's catalog, under a name its own engineers had not chosen.

~ the record ~

~ it shipped as a box first ~

The original product was hardware. It was announced in May 2010 as a clustered database appliance wired together over InfiniBand, built under the codename Sierra. It sold that way until roughly 2014. The software-only version turned up on the AWS Marketplace in 2013 and reached general availability at the end of October that year, three years after the appliance was announced.

~ item 2.05 ~

MariaDB plc filed an 8-K dated 12 October 2023 under the heading that public companies use for exit and disposal activities. The text is plain: products not related to the core MariaDB Enterprise Server business, including SkySQL and Xpand, will no longer be sold, and the company had implemented a plan to help existing customers migrate off them. The same restructuring cut 84 people, about 28 percent of the workforce.

The useful number is the impairment. In that filing MariaDB wrote down roughly $7.9 million of goodwill and $0.9 million of intangibles across the Clustrix and CubeWerx purchases together, which is a company stating on the record what it thinks the acquisition turned out to be worth. No source gives a formal end-of-support date for Xpand, and nobody appears to have bought the technology out, so the shutdown is dated by a disclosure rather than by an announcement to users.

~ what the redirect leads to ~

clustrix.com answers today, redirecting to a MariaDB page about high availability and clustering. The page it lands on mentions neither Clustrix nor Xpand anywhere in its text. docs.clustrix.com returns a gateway error through Cloudflare and clustrixdb.com resolves to an address that answers nothing at all. The documentation survives only in archive captures.

One correction worth leaving here, because this one propagates. The English Wikipedia article cites the acquisition press release as dated 20 February 2018. The release itself is dated 20 September 2018, which is also the date on the TechCrunch report filed the same day. There was no February acquisition.

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