New Relic CEO Lew Cirne banged his head against that problem for the majority of 2012. He finally had his “aha!” moment on Dec. 30 while on a family vacation in Tahoe: He needed to build a new kind of database, one designed to catch crumbs, and he knew exactly how to do it.
So he sent his family home without him and got his hands dirty.
“I spent a month up there coding, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., just banging it out. I had a ‘Hello, world’ database up and running in two weeks,” Cirne said in an interview with VentureBeat this week.
“In the summer, I started working on the interface and making it so anyone can run these queries and get visualizations.”
The result is Rubicon, a big data-crunching piece of software that works like a warhorse and feels like a butterfly. By that we mean that using it is light and almost playful — it doesn’t require too much thought or effort, and the output is beautiful and easy to understand.
What’s most impressive, though, is that warhorse and the incredible speed and dexterity with which it handles the aforementioned hundreds of billions of data points. (And, by the way, the data have been gathered from New Relic’s customers and end users since June, so there’s plenty of info to sort.)
