Image: Percona

Having integrated Tokutek's storage engine into its MySQL fork in January, MySQL services firm Percona has now acquired the company itself, expanding its database activities into NoSQL and MongoDB for the first time.

Along with the TokuDB alternative to MySQL's standard InnoDB storage engine, the acquisition provides Percona with Tokutek's TokuMX distribution of MongoDB and Fractal Tree indexing technology.

The move also gives Percona an exclusive global licence to technology developed by MIT, Stony Brook, and Rutgers Universities and incorporated into Fractal Tree indexing by Tokutek. The Fractal Tree technology is designed to improve storage compression and read-write performance by replacing widely-used B-tree indexing.

Percona said it will now be offering services, support and remote management for the ACID-compliant TokuMX row-level locking derivative of MongoDB.

According to Percona, TokuMX addresses MongoDB's known issues with default transactional consistency, concurrency, space and memory consumption, and performance under load.

Percona co-founder and CEO Peter Zaitsev said in a statement that by adding TokuMX to the firm's product line, customers "have the opportunity to simplify their database decisions and on-going support relationships".

As well as many smaller organisations, Percona already counts Cisco Systems, Time Warner Cable, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, and the BBC among its 3,000-plus customers worldwide. It provides software, support, consulting, and managed services, in addition to its MySQL and now MongoDB distributions.

Matt Aslett, research director, data platforms and analytics at 451 Research, said in a statement that the acquisition continues Percona's expansion into the wider database market.

"Percona was already a reseller of the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL - including MariaDB and Percona Server - but has now also entered the NoSQL market by adding the TokuMX distribution of MongoDB," he said.

In January, Percona said the integration of TokuDB into Percona Server 5.6 as a drop-in replacement for the standard InnoDB storage engine offered a 20 times improvement in read-write performance over InnoDB, with data compression up between five and 25 times.

Percona Server is an open-source MySQL alternative, which earlier this year the company said had been downloaded 1.4 million times and described as being optimised for cloud computing, NoSQL access, and hardware such as SSD and Flash storage.

The acquisition of Tokutek, on undisclosed terms, was completed on 7 April but only announced today.

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