Machine learning data pipeline outfit Splice Machine files for insolvency

California-based ML data pipeline company Splice Machine has begun insolvency proceedings, according to a statement on its website. The startup – which counted bank Wells Fargo, retailer Kroger, and optical networking company Infinera among its customers – specialised in building a database for feature engineering which it …

[vtcodger]

???

I've read the article several times and I have not the slightest idea what Splice Machine does/did other than generate buzzword laden press releases and lose their investor's money -- perhaps as much as $56.5M of it. Would anyone care to enlighten me as to what an innovative "machine learning data pipeline" might be and what, if anything, it might possibly be good for?

[Twilight]

Re: ???

I don't know about recently. Around 5 years ago, they offered a layer on top of Hadoop that added SQL (and iirc ACID) support. Based on the article and what I know, it seems like they offered a variety of products related to big data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ???

Not quite. SQL + ACID layers on Hadoop are ten a penny. Their main pitch was an OLAP layer, with cubes built transparently with Spark jobs and persisted into HBase for scalable/resilient/low latency retrieval.

Honestly it was really nice tech. Unfortunately it ran into the same problem almost every OLAP technology does: Almost nobody needs OLAP.

Especially in big data land there are almost no problems solved by OLAP that can't be solved (and arguably solved better) by a stonking great big fast MPP vanilla SQL - which every Hadoop cluster has 3-5 of kicking around already.

So the market was niche and the tech is still hard due to the curse of dimensionality and there are loads of established competitors. So they turned their hand to trying to do AutoML-style tooling and rebuilt all their kit to run on Kubernetes but at that point they were on iteration 3 and had no money and no credible product in a saturated market. So no rescue buyout/acquihire. So insolvency it is.