Hyper's journey

Hyper Started as a Research Project

In 2008 and under the guidance of professors Alfons Kemper and Thomas Neumann, the journey of Hyper started as a research project at the Technical University of Munich. Strictly speaking, Hyper was then written HyPer with a capital P as an acronym for "Hybrid High Performance". As part of the Tableau acquisition in 2016, HyPer became Hyper. Legend has it that a popular 90's techno song called Hyper Hyper had influenced the name finding, but that is in the realm of urban myths.

Hyper's Success in Academia

More than 50 peer-reviewed articles about Hyper have been published in journals as well as in the proceedings of various database conferences and workshops. Several of these publications and demos have received awards, including awards at the prestigious IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGMOD, and VLDB conferences. We are especially honored that two of our foundational publications have received the test of time award, one of the highest distinctions in the database research community:

• The first academic publication on the Hyper database system has been published in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering 2011 ("HyPer: A hybrid OLTP&OLAP main memory database system based on virtual memory snapshots", ICDE 2011) and has received the IEEE ICDE 10-year influential paper award in 2021.

• "Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware", published in the proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases 2011 (VLDB 2011), has received the VLDB 2021 Test of Time Award. This publication describes the foundation of Hyper's compiling query execution engine and was the first to introduce data-centric code generation and compilation for query processing on modern hardware. The then-novel technique that Thomas Neumann had pioneered in Hyper has been adopted by many of the leading database engines over the past decade. Alongside vectorized query processing, query compilation is one of the two state-of-the-art processing paradigms for fast query processing.

Hyper Startup

In 2015, the six co-founders Dr. Jan Finis, Prof. Alfons Kemper, Ph.D., Prof. Dr. Viktor Leis, Dr. Tobias Muehlbauer, Prof. Dr. Thomas Neumann, and Dr. Wolf Roediger founded the Hyper spinoff startup with the mission to develop a database that disrupts the way people manage and analyze data on modern hardware.

Tableau acquires Hyper

In March 2016, Hyper was acquired by Tableau.

Hyper Powers Tableau

In January 2018 and after 18 months of integration, Tableau shipped version 10.5 of its products, all powered by Hyper as its new data engine. With Hyper's ability to slice and dice massive volumes of data in seconds, Tableau customers got up to 5X faster query speeds and up to 3X faster extract creation speeds compared to the previous Tableau data engine. This allowed faster insights for even larger data sets, giving organizations the ability to scale their analysis to more people. Later in 2018, Tableau launched its novel Prep product powered by Hyper as its data processing engine. Prep delivered new data preparation capabilities that brought a direct and visual experience. Data prep was made simple and the integration with the Tableau analytical workflow allowed people to get insights from their cleaned and enriched data sets even faster.

Launch of Hyper API

In 2019, Tableau launched Hyper API. The API allows customers and partners to automate their integrations with Tableau extracts, including the creation of new extract files as well as inserting, deleting, updating, and reading data from existing extracts. Hyper API was the first solution to expose Hyper's SQL capabilities to Tableau's end customers and partners.

Hyper at Salesforce

Hyper is the Salesforce Database for interactive analytics of the freshest state of data.