Simplicity of Use

Clusterpoint is a new, different and in many ways more productive approach to database design, management and search, compared to most of existing legacy SQL and NoSQL database technologies.  It was designed to simplify application software development with easy to understand database architecture, open data formats and open web protocols, at the same tome hiding all related technical complexity for data storage clustering, scale out ability and high-performance indexing and search mechanism behind the database server software, so that application software can work just with a single logical database and very simple concepts how to access and use it.

Imagine, that you can store and effectively manage all your data as native and undivided XML / JSON documents, in a de-normalized database (without heavy encodings, keys, indexes and relations, characteristic to SQL world), using both human-readable and machine-readable database storage formats that are already widely used for cross-platform data exchange interoperability.  

Here is what we did: we discarded all legacy software constraints and designed a new native XML / JSON database platform architecture and software from ground-zero.  To simplify complexity of search, characteristic to SQL and most of NoSQL databases, we designed and built into the very core of our database server engine a freely configurable and flexibly programmable mechanism of Information Ranking for customer's own data relevancy rules.  It is an enabling factor for our database search simplicity and scalability.

This our approach of managing entirely ranked databases is innovative and unique among database servers.  It delivers lightning-fast search performance and works without performance loss for databases of any size, including search in massively clustered distributed databases.

Clusterpoint Server is fast and scalable, entirely searchable database server platform and very simple to use database technology.

Internally Clusterpoint Server stores all data in XML data format.  Both XML and JSON are absolutely open data formats, and both XML and JSON are supported by Clusterpoint API, yet because it is possible store all JSON into XML structure, but it is not possible to store all XML into JSON (there are some exceptions like cross-links), we decided to store data internally in industry standard XML data format.   As we have discovered in application use cases, slightly more performance needed to convert from JSON to/from XML pays back with better readability of database content by database administrators and owners, when it comes to the need to actually manage databases.  Another factor for this our design decision to store data internally in XML was that nearly every web browser supports native XML pages for visually nicely formated output, so there is no need for special browser software when there is a need to quickly check or verify data content in Clusterpoint databases without application software.   As very robust and established industry standard, XML is being well-supported from all IT vendors in almost all their enterprise software systems today.

One of the established myths in data management industry is that XML is too slow to process data, too "fat" for effective machine processing, and takes unnecessary storage space.  True enough, XML is a pure text based data format, exactly like HTML.  Is today's WEB running on top of HTML slow?  We think that there is nothing wrong with XML either.  Simply there are far too few software tools that effectively enables to manage large databases in XML.  The problem with legacy XML-enabled SQL databases usually is some old architecture concept, trying to add XML functionality to already existing core relational system-based framework.  Their XML support is designed like a shell functionality, not the core principle how they store, index and search data objects.  This is crucial for legacy database performance, as it requires a lot of extra transformations from proprietary data formats to XML at runtime, slowing everything down.  

In our approach we still do similar XML-JSON transformations for customers who prefer to use JSON data format, but this transformation is orders of magnitudes less resource consuming and less error prone, than the need to transform fixed multi-table structures to/from XML in legacy SQL architecture.  Both XML and JSON has the same data structure design tree-like hierarchy and therefore those two widely used data formats transforms into each other nearly effortlessly, at high speed.

Legacy databases platforms with support XML data objects normally are engineered to support XQuery, a language that was designed to be a "Magic bullet" for XML data management as a query language similar to SQL.  Unfortunately XQuery did not fully reached the true goals of its designers, and consequently did not get wide adoption among developers.  In our opinion, it was designed largely around the same 30-years old relational architecture inspired table-focused concepts for database search and querying, severely limiting search and data retrieval options for architects of this standard, in particular, where database performance and scalability are the two most important factors.  The resulting few viable XML database management systems on the market using XQuery are in our opinion rather complex "beasts".  They are mostly fairly heavy to use and program, often slow at performance, and does not scale out well.  In particular, XQuery -focused database platforms are difficult and cumbersome to search, with serious performance problems, hindering wider adoption of XML as an industry standard database format.

Clusterpoint database technology does not use XQuery, not SQL languages for database access and search.  We figured out more simple way to achieve the required functionality and how to do it at the highest possible speed on available hardware.

Please read to learn more Clusterpoint Technology & Vision, Clusterpoint Indexing and Clusterpoint Search. 

High-Speed Clustering Software

Our core software product is Clusterpoint Server.   It is a well-engineered and commercially-supported database management system (DBMS) proved in mission-critical 24/7 production environment by our Customers.  

It is a complete server-based, transactional, high-performance, scalable in a distributed cluster, document-oriented NoSQL database management system with a novel approach for the key database functionality: Search.

Its key competitive advantage is ability to support free format Internet-style ad hoc search, including full text search, out-of-the-box, with sub-second response times.

It is a database platform, that is natively and linearly scalable in clusters.  It has been engineered as a fast, scalable, private cloud JSON / XML database management system, that enables to address several key problem areas of modern IT, in particular, fast growing databases size scalability problem, and scalable and relevant high speed search problem in that growing data volumes.

Clusterpoint Server's cluster architecture enables to develop scalable web applications for databases of any size, where access and search to all stored information does not suffer performance loss characteristic to legacy SQL and most of NoSQL platforms today.

Clusterpoint Index system enables to rank all of your database information for RELEVANT sub-second search, grouped and ordered (sorted) by your own business driven rules that you can configure as complex as you need without software programming, so that it work nearly without any performance loss in massive size databases.  This  Information ranking is crucial to understand Clusterpoint DBMS performance and scalability characteristics and use them at full advantage.

Designed for interactive web applications and based on robust industry standards: XML / JSON and web protocols TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, it is very easy to integrate into existing application systems.  Clusterpoint DBMS automatically creates the full database content index for ultra-fast structured, unstructured and semi-structured search, including updating of the full text index, whenever an JSON / XML document is being stored, added or modified.  Clusterpoint DBMS does not require to set up database indexes SQL-style and the database platform is data structure agnostic: any schema-less JSON / XML documents can be stored, accessed and searched by our customers.

Clusterpoint Server has open API based on schema-less JSON / XML and HTTP REST or native TCP/IP protocol.  The resulting server product is a high-performance DBMS platform to store, manage and search your databases in native JSON / XML data format.

Clusterpoint's concept of JSON / XML only database management system fits enterprise customer needs, who would like to standardize on a open, cross-platform, widely used for interoperability, industry standard data formats and at the same time radically increase performance and scalability of their existing database systems.  

Internally Clusterpoint stores all data in XML (there are reason for that choice: due to some limitations of JSON, XML can accommodate more types of data, but not vice versa).  If it sounds counter-intuitive and impossible to achieve high-performance benchmarks with XML data, when everyone knows that XML is a text data format with its well-known performance problems in legacy systems, you are welcome to Download and test-drive the performance of Clusterpoint Server software for free.  Our "Magic bullet", that solves XML performance problems is our database architecture, where enterprise search (in fact, any enterprise search is primarily a text search) functionality has been designed from ground-zero to be the core high-speed data retrieval mechanism for our database server software, so that for application systems there is no difference, is the database internally encoded in binary format or in plain XML (text).  

Clusterpoint database software radically simplifies database design, management and search for our customers because it merges together 3 different software technologies - data storage clustering, database functionality and enterprise search - into a single, cohesive DBMS software platform with open API, so that the resulting database system is very simple to learn and use.  From application developer point of view all high-performance computing and data processing is done by Clusterpoint Server software transparently, behind the scenes: all data storage clustering, scalable cluster-wide indexing and scalable cluster-wide search.  There is no need to program for clustering, database replication or enterprise search in the application software with Clusterpoint.  The Clusterpoint Server delivers database management simplicity, data store scalability and information retrieval (in particular, search) speed and quality all in a single platform software.

We package the product with an easy to use web-based administration utility: Clusterpoint Manager, providing enterprise-level centralized Clusterpoint software management system.  Our management system allows to manage and control scalable database cluster software and underlying hardware infrastructure in consolidated and cohesive way, which is a necessity in corporate data centers.  Clusterpoint Manager utility is used to create, configure and administer all Clusterpoint single-server databases, cluster databases (where database is partitioned among multiple cluster nodes), mirrored databases (where multiple replicated database copies operate in parallel) and all Clusterpoint Server software instances enterprise-wide, including database server instances run within modern virtualized environments.  Please see also Clustering and Management. 

Simple XML/JSON Data Store Model

Clusterpoint was designed around few very simple database concepts.  

From a customer and a developer point of view, Clusterpoint works almost as a simple "cloud" database: it is a key-based data store (we call it a storage), where each data object (XML / JSON document) is stored and accessed through a unique id (key).  A key can be any unique customer chosen string such as file name, account number, social security number, web link etc.  A key should be a part of customer own XML / JSON data object (any existing XML tag or JSON attribute can be set to be used as key at database configuration level).  Aside of identification key, it is a data structure agnostic database, anything can go in and out without any schema.  All clustering, including database operations, indexing and search in cluster setup is managed behind the scenes by the Clusterpoint Server, hidden from the application software. 

Internally Clusterpoint stores data in industry standard XML data format, providing open API where application developers can use either XML or JSON to interoperate with Clusterpoint Server in their proffered data exchange format.

De-normalization of database model is another crucial advantage of building and operating XML  or JSON only databases using Clusterpoint database platform.  The database open and flexible internal XML format essentially is text, and therefore it allows to quickly de-normalize entire customer's data from legacy encodings and dependencies (remove all technical encoding complexity of relational database design).

Customers can integrate only the meaningful data from their legacy database tables, normally for each application transforming multiple  different-structure interrelated tables into a single, user-friendly and humanly easily understandable consolidated JSON or XML data store. This data store is then being indexed and updated in real-time fully and automatically by Clusterpoint Server, upon any document writes or updates.  All databases in Clusterpoint architecture can be referred to as simple data storages, leaving core database indexing and search tasks for Clusterpoint Server to do.  In fact, from the the most general overview, any Clusterpoint database behaves as just a (possibly giant) cloud data storage for uniquely identified data objects of arbitrary customer-own defined structure.  A Clusterpoint storage can even store different structure data objects within the same single data storage, a feature, unimaginable in relational SQL world.

In Clusterpoint storage virtually any type of customer database (relational, object, key-value store, document-store or just a collection of files) can be ultimately represented as a collection of uniquely identified XML / JSON documents containing only de-normalized data and accessible through a unique key.  If we resort to relational database analogy, it can be perceived as a simple one-table database, where each XML / JSON document is a full database "record", identified by unique id (key), and each full data record can contain complete and undivided description of your real-life data objects in all of their versatility and complexity (e.g., a company profile with its historical financial data, a person profile with its all social network connections, a bank account with all of transactions etc.).  

The greatest advantage of this our data model probably is that data objects can contain all and complete 'knowledge' about particular real-life objects, there is no need to partition your data into more detailed tables and columns, fields, indexes and relationships.  Every object is just an XML / JSON document.  Any object can be stored, manipulated and accessed as a single item from your application software point of view, radically simplifying also your software systems.  Clusterpoint Server built-in search engine handles all the search across such a simplified and de-normalized structure database without performance loss, characteristic to legacy SQL systems, when database size grows big.  Fast access and search to such a database information is guaranteed through Information Ranking, a scalable high-speed mechanism of our database indexing facility that uses pre-sored ranked index and that works in cluster storage architecture.

Organizing your database in this way also make it highly scalable: there are no more multi-table dependencies characteristic to SQL multi-table systems in Clusterpoint database architecture.  All transaction programming for database updates becomes very simple, and database content can be automatically split among as many servers as necessary for running very large database requiring massive scalability.  Please see also Clustering. 

Integrated Enterprise Search

Clusterpoint innovative XML / JSON database software provides most of the commonly used functionality of software products belonging to enterprise search engine market category.  Rich enterprise search functionality was engineered as standard functionality into the very core of our DBMS core server software.

Fast and easy to use Internet-style ad hoc keyword search functionality previously was available only through the integration of two diverse systems: an SQL database + an enterprise search engine (ESE) platform.

Usually this required extensive development time and sophisticated integration services.  It also required the operation and maintenance in parallel of a database platform software and a search engine platform software.  It is expensive and cost-inefficient model, still widely used by many organizations.

Clusterpoint DBMS software empowers customer applications with entirely searchable and scalable database technology in a single programming and operational platform: Clusterpoint Server.  It has a rich enterprise search functionality already built-in into the core of database data retrieval mechanism.

In Clusterpoint architecture the entire database information is being indexed up to the very last detail (string, word, number, date, tag etc.), and index is being updated in real-time along document writes.  Clusterpoint software hides real complexity of enterprise search quality indexing and search clustering behind database infrastructure.  It does all required memory caching, transaction journaling, data object versioning, optimization for fast sequential disk access, multi-core CPU parallel processing, RAM-only map-reduce interoperability among cluster nodes, and other best practice software engineering methods implemented into Clusterpoint Server source code, but all data is processed only internally, transparently from application.  The resulting database platform is a fully transactional, high-performance, multi-master server software driven, NoSQL data base management system (DBMS) and an enterprise search platform at the same time, with no single-point of failure cluster architecture.  It fits multi-tier server model of modern IT infrastructure and through open web-standards based API and open XML/JSON data formats easily integrates into any existing IT infrastructure.  Our customers can start developing natively scalable, remarkably fast, web database applications powered by rich and versatile enterprise search functionality, that automagically works out-of-the-box. 

With Clusterpoint XML / JSON only database platform you can save substantial sums of money over the life-time of your database application where enterprise search functionality presence is required.  In most cases TCO can be substantially improved when customers decide to migrate from SQL-ESE integrated solution to a single Clusterpoint DBMS platform.  Our customers can eliminate or avoid most of ESE-SQL tandem complexity-related costs.  

With Clusterpoint the greatest savings are in database and enterprise search engine integration - there is none necessary.  

Additional savings could come from extra commercial ESE software licensing costs, ongoing annual ESE software support and maintenance costs, duplicate maintenance efforts to administer two different data and indexing systems, possibly extra hardware and need to train new employees and developers to work with specialized proprietary enterprise search tools, that require heavy integration into application software, making customer software applications ESE-vendor dependent and locked into proprietary search customization methods that are difficult to understand and maintain for any untrained IT staff.  Please see sample comparison tables of related costs in both cases above.


Please note, that with Clusterpoint there is also no need to pay per client access, per data volume, per number of databases or per number of CPUs on a server.  Please see more in Licensing. 

Open API with Rich Search Options

Being a software developer, with open XML / JSON based Clusterpoint API messaging you can exploit many new Clusterpoint database functions previously impossible with SQL databases or being rather difficult and expensive to implement for large size legacy SQL-based databases. For example, fast sub-second full text search for a large SQL database was optimal only through a third party tool.

Please see the Table with some of Clusterpoint database platform API features you can benefit, access and start using out-of-the-box, no matter what is your database size, and no need to integrate or look for some other software tools or services.

Clusterpoint database software enables anyone to develop rich and powerful, interactive web applications for database access, search and navigation, including full text search with results snippets, auto-complete and faceted search and navigation, geo-location (e.g. distance sorting), spell-check and tons of other fine-grain quality search options.  Our customers can do it without spending any efforts for writing integration software, that is required if they would use SQL or NoSQL databases jointly with an enterprise search software.  This rich and versatile search functionality is built-in as part of our core database server software and works at lightning-fast speed, in scalable way across the entire cluster.

Fully controlling and owning the Clusterpoint Server source code, our team of developers is continuously adding new database search functionality, based on the feedback from our customers.

We also offer Development Support, adding features and capabilities requested by our customers in fast C/C++ core database server engine source code and then distributing enhanced software versions by priority to match our customer business plan and time schedule.  

We also offer Premium Technical Support.  This support quality and speed is essential to our enterprise customers running mission-critical 24/7 systems in production environment. 

Configurable Search Relevancy

Our database indexing method is based on Information Ranking and is crucial for both our database technology scalability and simplicity of use.  We dedicated the whole section of our Web site with detailed description how it works, please see Information Ranking.

It enables to store and manage all of your data in any custom XML or JSON format, effectively search it Internet-style, even with simple search keywords, and still get the most relevant data upfront (on the first results page in web apps) at ultra-fast sub-second speed - independently of the total database size and without performance loss characteristic to SQL based systems when databases grow big. 

The greatest advantage of our database indexing method is that entire database content can be flexibly configured at database configuration level for the best search relevancy at high speed.  There is no need to change or adopt application software code, saving tons of coding efforts from development projects in Clusterpoint database world.  All database search, grouping, ordering rules can be defined and set up at database configuration level, with a small XML file we call Document Policy, and then Clusterpoint Server software automatically maintains those relevancy rules for exact search results positioning and sorting, even if a database is distributed among numerous cluster nodes.  Customers can flexibly tune and performance optimize this indexing system (rank their databases for great and high-speed sub-second search), until the search and data retrieval results match the customer expectations for a particular database.  This is ultimate simplicity in handling database indexing, providing also data volume scalability and powerful enterprise search options.  In essence, application software can be made free from any search or indexing specific dependencies, leaving this task to Clusterpoint Server software that does it behind the scenes automatically maintaining the required customer defined indexing and relevancy rules.

In fact, our database querying mechanism was implemented as simple as possible too: it is either simple keyword-based queries exactly like on the Internet or you can use XML syntax for structural data queries, or combination of both. There is no need to learn and understand rather complex XQuery syntax for Clusterpoint developers.  Still, using our seemingly simplistic database querying approach, application developers can perform powerful Boolean and multi-level nested queries, addressing XML structure, meta data and full text search data retrieval needs.  Please see more about Clusterpoint Search.

Those two Clusterpoint DBMS core design and engineering features: fast guaranteed sub-second Search and Information Ranking alone can enable significant productivity savings for our customer organizations, compared to old SQL based legacy database storage mostly used today.   Please see our sample return on investment calculation we provide in section Calculate ROI. 

Ease of Integration with Legacy SQL

With Clusterpoint software our customers can improve existing corporate database and web application quality, search speed and usability.

Please note, that SQL is there to stay.  It is not possible to re-program tens of applications for another database platform overnight.  Most likely SQL will stay as a robust and reliable technology for managing table-oriented databases for many years.

Clusterpoint initially can be used as a complementary database platform technology addressing performance and scalability problems of legacy database systems.

Companies  having legacy SQL systems, typically start to use Clusterpoint by simple exporting of any relevant XML data from their SQL server based databases into Clusterpoint database platform and using it to drive fast database search, navigation and data retrieval for web applications.  

Clusterpoint API is open and based only on web-standards only, and practically all SQL systems have tons of tools to export / import data in XML.  So there is nearly no extra integration efforts required to test-drive Clusterpoint databases for many new projects and with immediate and optimal use of already collected data.  Customers can transfer part or all of functionality from SQL data store into Clusterpoint, compare it side by side for required features, and prove its robustness, reliability and speed as a primary data storage.

Since Clusterpoint API is really easy to learn, it maybe can take about a couple of hours to understand the concept and start programming for Clusterpoint DBMS.  Our customers are encouraged to test-drive Clusterpoint databases along their SQL equivalents, optimally loading a sample database containing at least few millions of records (the more, the better) to test performance and scalability, and then, after doing required benchmarks on the actual customer sample data, start planning for the cluster setup and full data sets.

Advantages of implementing Clusterpoint DBMS storage infrastructure along the existing SQL servers are the following:

•  it enables adding Internet-style user-friendly ad hoc search transactions to existing corporate web applications using existing SQL database data, speeding up corporate database querying by a factor of 100 to 1000;
• it essentially makes SQL data repositories scalable for fast and relevant search, extending their functionality with our open XML-only cross-platform database advantages;
• it efficiently extends SQL database functionality into enterprise search area, taking over all database search transactions and related workload;
• it serves as a redundant backup database in an open cross-platform and industry standard XML format for the customer's most relevant business data;
• existing SQL servers have less job to do, and can be used to efficiently service existing legacy applications for certain types of data (like user accounts), instead of trying to upgrade their capacity to handle all types and amounts of loosely structured data with relational database software (documents, events, profiles etc.).

In this way Clusterpoint software can be effectively used as a complementary as a redundant data retrieval system for existing databases with a scalable full text search system, solving search performance and search quality problems for large SQL-based databases.  More than 30-years old relational database architecture was never designed for amounts of data, what are routinely produced and stored by corporate IT systems today. That data can easily be managed by Clusterpoint XML-only database as subset of customer data stored for fast search and scalability on the platform that was designed from ground-zero to support that.  Customer original data objects themselves along all legacy database software applications, that display and modify those data objects stored in relational tables, can still be maintained only in SQL platform, unchanged.  Naturally nobody is going to replace overnight numerous applications developed around SQL databases during the last decade or two.

For example, in many cases customers can leave SQL servers to centrally manage only core user accounting, application control, and statistics dashboards, which usually have a small database size foot-print and can be best managed in table architecture.  Customers can transfer all other database management tasks for all fast growing data volumes to the scalable Clusterpoint XML database platform.  Clusterpoint Server software will be then used in tandem with a legacy SQL database servers, managing only relevant data or scaling out only fast growing parts of existing SQL database data (such as text content rich data items, documents, linked data, fast-growing database subsets etc.).  This would probably be the most optimal setup for Clusterpoint DBMS usage in many use cases.  It improves ROI on existing databases, making them throughout searchable, instantly responsive and much better usable, and also providing always relevant search results to existing legacy database applications, with simple Internet-style ad hoc queries which users prefer nowadays.

Please note, that Clusterpoint web applications for existing databases can be made scalable and extremely fast at search with minimum application software code changes, if any.  Clusterpoint DBMS provides Information Ranking mechanism for setting up and configuring any custom search relevancy rules at database configuration level, that are then built into Clusterpoint's scalable search facility - Clusterpoint Index.  There is no need to change application software to rank search queries or to integrate it with some enterprise search software in Clusterpoint architecture. Clusterpoint DBMS provides ranking facility out-of-the-box, as a simple database configuration file.

It all translates into higher ROI figures for customers with respect of existing SQL databases too, in particular, cutting application software development time and making it more simple and understandable by developers.

Query-Generated Database Facets

Clusterpoint Server supports using server-side facets:  a list of custom categories with total number of search hits matching each category, dynamically generated by server software for each search query and returned together with search results to customer application.  Customer can use facets as prompts to users for narrowing down or expanding next search queries just by simple one-click access, without the need to re-enter search query.  This mechanism for building dynamic database facets from the actual database content is built-in into the Clusterpoint database architecture, delivered by fast server-side code.  Please see an example below:

Database facets are one of the most useful features for modern web applications.  This feature can be used to quickly understand how many data is being produced by certain type events, or data groups when searched for a specific content with full text search queries.  It can also be used to substantially improve Web user interface and web navigation layout functionality, especially, where database data is categorized by large number of facets, for example, hundreds or even thousands of some catalog items or category-type data, for example, by geographic location (as shown in the sample screen above), document themes, or a business directory areas.  In essence native support for server-side database facets functionality eliminates the need to work with all catalog items in application software and effectively reduce information overload on screens, leaving for end-users only the relevant catalog items (facets) matching their database search query.

Please note, that there is no need to build special databases with all facets for Clusterpoint.  Facets are configured at index level and uses the actual database content as items for a specific facet values: any XML tag or JSON attribute field can be assigned as facet value holder by our customer in Clusterpoint DBMS architecture.  Clusterpoint's multi-level hierarchical facets are returning only actual query-matching facets from a database and number of corresponding hits per facet, providing organized faceted navigation search options together with search results for customer web interface applications. 

Web application developers can start building smart query-specific database navigation user interfaces, instantly pivoting, narrowing or expanding database information views in multitudes of ways, using their own custom database catalog or taxonomy items present in the database (defined as facets in Clusterpoint DBMS architecture), without writing of reporting software and without executing any traditional reports which are often very slow when processed on large databases.

During search facets are handled on the index level by Clusterpoint Server, and this server-side functionality is extremely fast, compared to managing and developing facets-supporting interfaces in customer application software. With Clusterpoint it is not necessary to program complex facet grouping and ordering logic in customer application software, delivering maximum performance for customer web applications.  All those querying and search features with multi-level facets, coming from the enterprise search engine software world, are built-in into the core Clusterpoint XML database server engine, written in fast C/C++ code.  Facets are used as parts to organize Clusterpoint Index.  They do not change customer database content.  Clusterpoint facets simplify application software, at the same time enabling to face-lift and improve user interface for web applications, making your databases more user-friendly and responsive.

High-Availability Fail-Safe Database 

With Clusterpoint Server database platform software you can build and run many of your mission-critical business applications and Internet services nearly at 100% availability at no extra cost, compared to most other commercially-supported database platforms charging top money for that functionality.

There is no single point of failure in the Clusterpoint distributed database architecture if the software is installed and run into a cluster of many networked servers.  Any commodity servers can be used for running parts of the entire database such as a national Internet index or large document database or email archive, with billions of data objects  distributed among all cluster nodes.

Whenever a single node fails in a distributed database cluster, other nodes will still be operating and customer business services will be unaffected but some temporary inaccessible data items.  Even a downtime for that particular failed cluster node will be minimal, while system engineers will replace the malfunctioning equipment and restore the last backup copy, for example, by copying it from a neighbor cluster node used to backup every database copy in pairs.

Clusterpoint provides all common clustering options without the need to implement changes in customer application software, please see Clustering.

The system availability level can be raised just adding more cluster nodes.  It results into high satisfaction level for Clusterpoint database software customers and their users, knowing that their corporate or Internet services are never lost completely due to some failure of a mainframe-type server or expensive disk array (who may also eventually fail as any equipment sometime does).  Quick replacement of expendable hardware is the best solution how to fix the problem in a cluster (cloud) architecture.

Fault-Tolerant Datacenter Replication

For applications, requiring high level of safety and strong fault-tolerance guarantees, the Clusterpoint Server supports mirroring of the whole distributed database cluster to another identically distributed cluster database.   Clusterpoint Server software synchronizes all updates among clustered nodes, even if mirror nodes are located into different data centers.  For this replication to work at high speed, a high-speed VPN link is required and encryption is recommended.

This clustering option enables automatic database replication among multiple data centers, each running identical copy of the entire active database, where all updating transactions are automatically propagated to all mirror nodes in cluster, and then maintained in synchronized way, providing the highest level of business continuity for customer database operations. 

Customers running Clusterpoint software in this multiple redundant data center configuration have an option to instantly switch over all operations from any site to another datacenter in case of natural disasters like earth-quakes, floods etc.  This multi-data center replication can be easily done for any Clusterpoint database, establishing as many clustered database copies in different locations as required.  The support is built into the Clusterpoint Server software.

Full clustered database mirroring into multiple active copies can also be used for distribution of total end-user workload by geography or other criteria, for example, by routing some Internet service requests to the most nearby data center. 

The scope of controlled wide-area clustering options in Clusterpoint database also enable to establish geographically distributed cluster databases, where particular cluster nodes are located in specific locations to contain local data, servicing local customers and main local workload from the subset of the database with relevant local data.  At the same time the entire database is comprised from all geographically interconnected nodes as a large logical database and is available for centralized querying and access.  

This scalability to run massively clustered database, physically located in multiple data center locations, and mirrored for fault-tolerance, provides excellent database platform of choice for many scientific, research, government and community customers, who may require a common database infrastructure with precise controls of particular data location, especially if some data contains private information regulated by local privacy laws, and still be able to provide commonly agreed cross-organizational or international access for entire database, in particular, when fast, versatile and global search across all resources is required.  There are very few other database infrastructure software on the market providing this versatility.

Designed for Mission Criticality

Our database platform was developed for use in mission-critical IT environments.  It has been proved in production by our customers, running public Internet services as 24/7/365 operations.  Please see our Customers.

Today almost every IT organization and business to achieve all targets for mission-critical database operations have to integrate and maintain a range of products and technologies, sometimes from different vendors.  There are frequently 3 or more customizable software platforms running at customer back-office (commonly: an application, a database and a full text search software), that  need to be cross-platform integrated and maintained.  With Clusterpoint you can reduce that system complexity right away by 1/3rd: using a single software platform for a database and a search: Clusterpoint Server.

Clusterpoint Server meets all key mission-criticality requirements and operates as a single-platform, delivering  database and full text enterprise search functionality:

It's fast.  It is designed for lightning-fast queries to locate any useful information within XML in a fraction of a second.

Through generic clustering on an inexpensive and easily expendable equipment with Clusterpoint DBMS you can start exploiting full database mirroring into multiple copies for performance scalability. 

Using same clustering with our distributed database architecture, you can stop worrying about total database size growth and related performance bottlenecks.  You can also linearly decrease total indexing time of your database in a distributed database cluster simply by adding new cluster nodes.

With our Clusterpoint Index automatically covering entire XML database content, and being updated in real-time, you can avoid the need to integrate with difficult to maintain indexes of enterprise search systems mostly used to add full text search to your legacy databases.  You can also stop worrying about de synchronization of your database data and full text search software indexes, eliminating delays it often causes for index upgrades (many full text search systems still use 'deltas'-principles, where you incrementally index a smaller portion of data, later merging it with the rest of  database full text index).  It all ads to complexity and make overall system more error prone.  Then there is support hassles: who is to blame if something does not work: database vendor?, enterprise search vendor? or your own application developers addressing integration of two previous systems also in their software with query terms ranking or similar complex algorithmic methods?  With Clusterpoint Server you have all the functionality in a single-platform product and you have a single vendor full commercial support for our product.  You can also simplify your application software as described in next sections.

There are multi-tier client-server IT environments typically used in corporate data centers.  They require a good partitioning of security.  Clusterpoint Server is designed to work as a secure transactional data storage engine for your XML data.  Our DBMS comes with an enterprise class centralized management system - Clusterpoint Manager - providing secure authorized access to database administrators and API users, based on their specific access privileges per server, per database or per cluster.  

Please note, that there are many open source databases and tools, addressing just some of mission-critical search or indexing functionality that they do best, and mostly leaving all the other 'tasks' as second thought.  It is often difficult and expensive to integrate them into a workable solution, especially, if all mission criticality requirements are important.  

Clusterpoint DBMS delivers all mission-criticality requirements for our customer database services in a single database platform product, out-of-the-box. 

Commercially Supported DBMS

Clusterpoint is a core IT infrastructure database software products company founded in 2006.  

Our flag-ship software product is Clusterpoint Server, a full-fledged scalable and entirely searchable DBMS platform, with openly published API based on standard web technologies and industry standard XML or JSON data storage format, and with enterprise class cluster-wide management system to set up, configure and administer all cluster databases in simple and efficient way.  The software is a mature, reliable and well-supported NoSQL database platform software product used in production by variety of our enterprise customers in different industries and business sectors today.  Please see Products and Customers.

We develop and technically support Clusterpoint Server.  It is being licensed to our customers similarly to any commercial SQL database management system (DBMS) software.  We provide basic and premium technical support services for customers running their databases in production environment with Clusterpoint as data storage software.  We also provide consulting services related to Clusterpoint DBMS software

We can commit to the necessary level of service guarantees (SLA) and support terms, requested by customers, in particular, guaranteeing timely support and assistance for customers, who are running their databases in mission-critical production environments such as 24 hour 365-day Internet services. 

There are several Premium Technical Support packages our customers can subscribe. 

Premium Technical Support services are provided over the Internet and phone and include guaranteed response times for incidents, emergency software patches, remote login for problem diagnostics and problem resolution assistance and other agreed support services.

You can read more about technical support for production environments in section Premium Technical Support.

There are also consulting services provided for customer training and certification by Clusterpoint Ltd.  We also provide database "health"-check, consulting on application specific know-how and other our extra services, please see more in Support / Consulting and Application Support.

We also provide development support.  You are welcome to ask us to develop extra functionality for our core database engine source code. Upon customer request, if mutually agreed, we can deliver those modifications in the database server software in short time, in most cases in weeks rather than months.  There are potentially many useful features which can be better implemented in fast C/C++ software code into the Clusterpoint DBMS core data storage and search engine,  instead of developing them into application software.  Server based fast machine-code optimized functionality can yield significant productivity boost for manyweb applications.

Clusterpoint Server source code is written in C/C++ and our company key developers are also co-owners of the company.  We are fully controlling development road-map of our source code of Clusterpoint Server and related software application products developed by your company.  

Normally we develop our core database software features based on feedback from our customers using our product, with scheduled release dates for new versions and modifications planned in the next months.  If your business needs can not wait for new core database software platform functionality, please let us know about your requirements and we could mutually agree for custom development, re-scheduling our planned development to address your issues in the nearest our software upgrade, or even we can make a specialized customized Clusterpoint server software version fitting only your exact needs.  This extra software development service we did successfully provide to some of our largest customers normally requiring some out-of-the-box solutions to stay competitive in Internet services area. 

With our custom development you get the DBMS software functionality features according to your time-schedule and your business needs, that is nearly impossible to obtain from open-source database technology vendors with known lock-in problems for community-wide code changes, confusing types of licensing and other issues.

We can also compile our database platform source code into binaries for customers having specific hardware and operating system configurations targeted for enterprise heavy-duty data processing environments.  Non-standard system sometimes can make it a big challenge to set up, configure and maintain reliable and stable solution with just free or open source (FOSS) software.

Please see also Support / Development Support Services.

All of the above our commercial support services will save you time and enable to focus your efforts on your business.  Our commercially supported Clusterpoint NoSQL database platform can save you tons of time, especially if you are a customer who is looking for better data management methods and higher productivity tools addressing your existing data management problem areas, but you do not want unpredictability and lack of quality development service and support guarantees typical of free or open source software solutions. 

Please see also our Web site sections Licensing and Support.