Hyper’s Origins: A Q&A with Tobias Muehlbauer and Allan Folting

2. What was the original intention of Hyper and the technology?

TM: Hyper started as an academic project around 10 years ago at Technical University Munich, an institution comparable to Stanford. And when we started, there was a lot of movement in the database market. Traditional technologies didn't satisfy performance and functional requirements for modern applications any longer. There were a lot of specialized systems coming-there was Hadoop, NoSQL systems, and specialized engines for transactions analytics.

With Hyper, we wanted to create something else. We wanted to build a relational system from the ground up, questioning the traditional design decisions and optimizing for modern hardware. Some of the things that followed is we optimized for in-memory processing and we took modern CPUs into account that have a lot of cores, but also are more complex.

We also focused on combining transactional systems and analytics, bringing these specialized systems together in one system to unify transactions, data ingestion, and analytics.

Why did we do that? The answer is simple. If you have specialized systems, your data is in different places. And it might be that your analytics system has a stale view on your data. With Hyper, you can really do analytics on the freshest data set. That was our main intention in the beginning, and it took us years to really build to the performance and functionality we wanted to see and have today.