[manigandham]

Apache Ignite is an in-memory data grid that supports persistence and overflow-to-disk. It primarily started as a cache and now has a full key/value store with SQL-92 on top, but isn't a full relational database. Instead it has other features like distributed data structures, messaging, and is more about connecting your applications together. Easier deployment model with all nodes being identical.

MemSQL is a distributed full-featured relational database that has in-memory rowstore and on-disk columnstore tables with rich support for SQL, fulltext search and JSON. It's a fast RDBMS and does really well with analytical queries.

Do you need a fast cache, key/value, messaging system? Or a RDBMS with fast OLTP + OLAP capabilities?

[majidazimi]

Presto on top of Apache Ignite is basically an OLAP database (It just takes some effort to write the connector). It doesn't support transactional workloads though.

[capkutay]

This sounds like one of those things that sounds fun on a whiteboard but will be hell to implement and actually make perform well at all.

[manigandham]

"Basically like" is very different from "engineered for"

Column-oriented storage itself is many times faster for analytical queries, even if on disk, and combined with the other optimizations of MemSQL will get you far better performance. Along with all the data being able to constantly undergo transactional updates.