Today, we announced our latest product version, MemSQL 6.7. With this release, MemSQL is now free for everyone to use for databases with up to 128GB of RAM usage, and no limit on database size on disk, including solid state drive (SSD).

Unlike what customers get from other database providers, the free tier of MemSQL is full featured and includes all enterprise capabilities, including high availability and security.

What Can You Do with the Free Tier?

You can do almost anything with MemSQL, using the free tier, that you can do if you have an Enterprise license, including capabilities and production use. The differences are that you can only configure the free tier of MemSQL to use up to 128GB of RAM usage, with unlimited database size on disk, and support is only community support; for paid MemSQL support, you need an Enterprise license.

The free tier allows customers to:

Learn . You can learn about MemSQL and how it works on your own or in conjunction with MemSQL Training.

. You can learn about MemSQL and how it works on your own or in conjunction with MemSQL Training. Develop and test . You can develop and test using MemSQL and full features, but without professional MemSQL support.

. You can develop and test using MemSQL and full features, but without professional MemSQL support. Deploy into production. If you’re willing and able to run your app within the RAM usage limitation, and without professional MemSQL support, you can deploy an app running into production.

However, if you use the free version you may reach the point where you need to go beyond the configuration requirements of the free tier or want professional MemSQL support. At that point, you can seamlessly move to a time-limited Enterprise trial license, and arrange with MemSQL to buy a full Enterprise subscription before the time limit expires.

What Kinds of Applications and Workloads Can the Free Tier Support?

You get 128GB of RAM capacity in the free tier of MemSQL, with unlimited database size on disk. This means you can run robust applications. Check out what some of our customers are already doing today that would be technically possible with the new, free tier of MemSQL.

Real-Time Geospatial Analytics with Wag!

Customer experience is of the utmost importance for service-driven organizations. That’s why Wag!, the “Uber for dogs”, chose MemSQL to help accelerate the tracking and visualization of dog walkers in real time. Location data is captured every five seconds in JSON format and is structured for SQL queries to track time, walk distance, and other statistics. The ingest and store requirements run within the 128GB memory range due to the use of AWS S3 as a historical archive. The end result is a fast data architecture that enables low-latency join queries of hot and archived data, resulting in a comprehensive yet real-time view of the dog walk in progress, delivered instantly to the customer’s mobile app. To learn more about Wag! and its use of MemSQL, read our blog post.

Trading Application

Managing and analyzing financial markets while delivering high-performance transactions for a fast-growing online brokerage can be a challenging task. This production application uses MemSQL to support up to 12,000 transactions a minute while simultaneously supporting queries for 250,000 unique users, with sub-second response time. The high-performance application is capable of running within the 128GB memory footprint due to the efficient use of memory and disk.

Image Recognition for Premium User Experience with Nyris

Retail companies must continuously innovate with breakthrough buying experiences. Nyris is a company delivering visual search for retailers, manufacturers, and more by leveraging fast image recognition with MemSQL. Nyris is capable of matching user-submitted photos against a repository of 100,000 products in milliseconds, helping each customer quickly match their photo with a product that’s available for sale. The application leverages MemSQL’s built-in ML scoring algorithms, known as DOT_PRODUCT, to perform vector similarity matching with sub-second response. The application is able to run on less than 128GB of memory while delivering a premium experience to customers.

Operating MemSQL’s Free Tier in Production

When you sign up for MemSQL, you receive a license key and instructions for installing the software in the cloud or in your data center.

The free tier of MemSQL is community-supported, backed by extensive documentation and a community of users. Companies looking for 24×7, ticket-based support and guidance, or those who require more than 128GB of RAM, will need to upgrade to an Enterprise license.

With the MemSQL free tier, you can configure up to 128GB of RAM capacity. It will not allow provisioning a cluster larger than this configuration. Users who need more compute for their application can contact us for an evaluation or subscription for an Enterprise license.

Updating to an Enterprise subscription is as simple as changing your license key. This can be done while online and requires no export/import or cumbersome upgrade steps.

Try MemSQL for your applications and analytical systems today. You can install MemSQL 6.7 for free.

For more information on MemSQL 6.7, see the press release and all eight blog posts on the new version: Product launch; managing and monitoring MemSQL 6.7 (includes MemSQL Studio); the new free tier (this post); performance improvements; the Areeba case study; the Wag! case study; the creation of the Visual Explain feature; and how we developed adaptive compression.