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Stellar performance and amazing tech support
January 31, 2023

Stellar performance and amazing tech support

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SingleStore

We use SingleStore to manage a large and complex analytical workload for multiple financial customers. SingleStore is the database behind our real-time user interface. SingleStore also hosts our dashboards that display a mixture of data computed dynamically at the time of display and pre-computed values generated when data is ingested. Our software allows users to track the performance of retirement plans, and to compare data across plans. Many of these operations are data-intensive and we've been able to roll out many new and often compute-hungry features since switching to SingleStore two years ago.
  • Technical support is stellar -- far above and beyond anything I've experienced with any other company.
  • When we compared SingleStore to other databases two years ago, we found SingleStore performance to be far superior.
  • Pipeline data ingestion is exceptionally fast.
  • The ability to combine transactional and analytical workloads without compromising performance is very impressive.
  • Although backups are robust, better support for incremental backups would be nice to have.
  • Support for IPv6 in the firewall settings for the cloud-based product would be useful.
  • An interface for scheduling maintenance in the cloud-based product would be a great improvement, though I hear that's coming soon.
  • Our data management costs are much lower with SingleStore.
  • Our ability to roll out new (and often data-intensive) features is better with SingleStore.
  • Great tech support and system management by SingleStore means that we do not need to dedicate an employee (or part of any employee) to running the database.
  • Our software runs faster now that we use SingleStore.
When we moved to SingleStore, one of my jobs was to port our stored procedures (of which there were about 100) from our old system to SingleStore. This was quite straightforward, and something that I liked in SingleStore was that it was easy to predict which approach to a stored procedure would have the best performance. With our old provider, we had to carefully performance-test our code to see whether it would be faster to use a temporary table or a common table expression (CTE). In SingleStore, the CTE is always faster. This makes it faster for us to write new code. In our old system, we used to have to pepper the code with join hints (e.g., hash join instead of loop join) to ensure optimal performance. Two years after porting our code to SingleStore, I have never yet had to use a join hint in my code. This, together with the previous point, means that I can focus on developing features for our product rather than subtly tweaking my code for performance. SingleStore performance is consistently impressive.
SingleStore handles all our data. But this was also true of our previous provider because all our data is relational. However, we are considering some future features that might take advantage of SingleStore's ability to handle unstructured data, JSON columns, and so forth. One feature that we like about SingleStore is how easy it is to run queries across multiple databases. This was far from straightforward with our previous provider.
We looked at Microsoft Azure SQL, MariaDB, Vertica, and RedShift. Our criteria were cost and performance. We also needed compatibility with the Azure cloud as this is where our other systems were running. This was in 2020. After approximately three months of evaluation, we chose SingleStore. SijgleStore was also very supportive during the transition from our old provider to their environment.

Do you think SingleStore delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SingleStore's feature set?

Yes

Did SingleStore live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SingleStore go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SingleStore again?

Yes

Our workload is 100% analytical. We also have to ingest a lot of data each month. SingleStore is a perfect match for our needs because it has fast pipelines for data ingestion and great performance, even in large and complex queries. We need fast response times for our user interface and great performance in our ETL processes, which are rather complicated. SingleStore handles all of this very well.

Using SingleStore

7 - We are mostly a company of engineers: development and QA. We also have product managers who use SingleStore.
We have no one in-house who needs to support SingleStore. We chose SingleStore because they do such a great job of removing the need for us to support the database cluster.
  • Interactive user interface for our customers.
  • Dashboards for our customers.
  • Rapid data ingestion.
  • We've been able to roll out some highly data intensive product features. It's a big win for our customers.
  • We might use SingleStore's ability to host unstructured data, and to use JSON columns.
We've been with SingleStore for two years and they are a perfect fit for our product needs.

Evaluating SingleStore and Competitors

Yes - SingleStore replaced Azure SQL. We found SingleStore to have better performance and to be much less expensive.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Other
The main driver of our move to SingleStore was cost. SingleStore is very cost effective.
We'd do the same again: identify some possible solutions, load data to evaluate them, pick one or two that seem promising, port some of our code to them and do a deeper eval. SingleStore worked closely with us to help make the technical implementation relatively easy. This worked out well for us.

SingleStore Implementation

We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - First we evaluated SingleStore and other systems. Then we ported our queries to SingleStore. Then we moved one customer to SingleStore, followed later by our other customers.
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - The biggest change was that our queries and stored procedures were written for Microsoft SQL Server. It was not an onerous task to port them over, but it needed to be done.
  • We were using too many temp tables in our old code. Switched to 100% CTEs in the new code and SingleStore performance really took off!

SingleStore Training

  • No Training
I watched some of SingleStore's online videos, which are very good. We also had two SingleStore people working closely with us to ensure that things went smoothly. We're just a small company so we were impressed to get such personal service.

SingleStore Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
We find the level of support in the standard product to be excellent.
Tech support is one of SingleStore's super powers. When we first implemented SingleStore, we were not doing some things right (too many temp tables, which had been a great way to do things in our previous provider's database engine). Tech support noticed this, opened a ticket for us, pointing out the problem, and recommended a solution. We have numerous stories about SingleStore tech support and the common theme is that their support engineers are universally knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful.
There have been several occasions when tech support has pro-actively alerted us to something requiring attention, usually something that we would never have noticed.

Using SingleStore

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Code development is very consistent.
  • Performance is predictable (and good).
  • The hosted solution removes the need for an in-house person to manage the system.
SingleStore uses standard SQL (MySQL flavor). It provides a web interface to view cluster reports.

SingleStore Reliability

We needed more memory on our cluster. SingleStore handled it very smoothly.
We have not experienced any downtime in the two years that we have been using SingleStore.

Integrating SingleStore

Everything went smoothly for us, even though there was a lot of code for us to port to SingleStore syntax (which is like MySQL syntax).
  • We integrated our own system (we are a software company)
All we needed to do was to port our queries and stored procedures from the Microsoft SQL Server flavor of SQL to the MySQL flavor that SingleStore uses. We have a lot of queries and stored procedures so this was a significant task, but it went smoothly.
  • File import/export
  • ETL tools
Work with the engineers that SingleStore assigns to help you.

Relationship with SingleStore

Two SingleStore people worked closely with us during implementation. We're just a small company so this level of personal service was very impressive.
We have a monthly meeting with SingleStore. They pro-actively check that things are going well. Their people are universally knowledgeable and helpful, and they care about how SingleStore is helping our business.
We have tech support whenever we need it, 24/7, and a brief monthly meeting to make sure things are going smoothly. But we did not need to negotiate this -- it seems to be just the standard way that SingleStore treats its customers.
SingleStore is very engaged with us as a customer. There is no special way that we need to deal with SingleStore because they are very easy to deal with.

Upgrading SingleStore

Yes - The upgrade went smoothly. There may have been a few seconds of downtime but we picked a time when our customers were unlikely to be using our system so I can't be sure that the system went down at all. There were no unexpected impacts of the upgrade.
  • We got a new feature -- point in time recovery.
  • The ability to schedule our own maintenance windows.
  • Autoscaling of the cluster later this year.