"SQL is a really powerful language, it's very easy to use for amazingly sophisticated stuff, but there's a class of things SQL can't do," he said. "So what you've seen occurring at ParAccel, and frankly at our competitors, is the extensibility to do MapReduce-type functions directly in the database, rather than try to move terabytes of data in and out to server clusters."

Cloudant, which makes software for use on-premise or in a public cloud, was the only company on the panel that has developed a "noSQL" database. It was designed to manage both structured and unstructured data, and to shorten the "application lifecycle," said co-founder and chief scientist Mike Miller.

"Applications don't have to go through a complex data modelling phase," he said. The programming interface is HTTP, Miller said. "That means you can sign up and just start talking to the database from a browser if you wanted to, and build apps that way. So, we're really trying to lower the bar and make it easier to deploy."

"We also have integrated search and real-time analytics, so we're trying to bring concepts from the warehouse into the database itself," he said.

The company's software is hosting "tens of thousands of applications" on public clouds run by Amazon EC2 and SoftLayer Technologies, according to Miller.