Stellar performance and amazing tech support
Updated November 15, 2024
Stellar performance and amazing tech support

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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
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
Using SingleStore
7 - We are mostly a company of engineers: development and QA. We also have product managers who use SingleStore. We all use SingleStore in the sense that any interaction with our product involves queries being run in the background. Moreover, our developers and QA team run queries directly, using database tools.
We have no one in-house whose job it is to support SingleStore. We chose SingleStore's hosted environment because they do such a great job of removing the need for us to support the database environment. This frees us up to focus on managing our application code and database schema, as well as product development.
- Interactive user interface for our customers.
- Dashboards for our customers.
- Rapid data ingestion.
- Data support for analytics
- 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 are planning to evaluate SingleStore's autoscaling feature, whereby additional compute resources are enabled when demand is high.
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
- 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
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
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. The tech support team responds quickly and all SingleStore's support engineers are knowledgeable and helpful. We had an incident one weekend where we needed to submit a support ticket and SingleStore set up a conference call to discuss it with us on Sunday night, which resolved the problem.
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.
However, one stand-out incident is when we needed tech support one weekend and submitted a support ticket. SingleStore scheduled a conference call with us on Sunday night. This call included one of their senior engineers. This resolved the problem.
However, one stand-out incident is when we needed tech support one weekend and submitted a support ticket. SingleStore scheduled a conference call with us on Sunday night. This call included one of their senior engineers. This resolved the problem.
Using SingleStore
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
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 Reliability
Integrating SingleStore
- 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
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 are now in the process of migrating to SingleStore's workspace environment, which allows for separation of storage and compute resources. This is working well in our staging environment and we will shortly move it to production.
We are now in the process of migrating to SingleStore's workspace environment, which allows for separation of storage and compute resources. This is working well in our staging environment and we will shortly move it to production.
- Ability to autoscale by adding compute resources automatically when needed.
- Ability to schedule maintenance windows ourselves.
- Better support for incremental backups
- Autoscaling of the cluster later this year.
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