VividCortex, a pioneer in the emerging field of database performance management, announced it has raised $2 million in seed-stage funding from investors including Jaffray Woodriff, who runs the Quantitative Investment Management fund, Battery Ventures and various angels. The company-co-founded last year by leading MySQL authority Baron Schwartz-plans to use the funds for product development and additional hiring.

VividCortex's technology helps Web-scale operations monitor, diagnose and fix performance problems that affect end users, including slow website performance. The software-as-a-service product can help large and small enterprises replace more-expensive, internal monitoring equipment and make database administrators more efficient.

The company's product is now in beta and being used by customers in fields such as e-commerce, media and finance.

'We are delighted to work with Jaffray and Battery. We are investing significantly in engineering and infrastructure, and their support and expertise is exactly what we need to keep hiring and building, as well as to mature our sales and marketing models,' said VividCortex Chief Executive Schwartz, who previously led sales, marketing, consulting and software engineering at Percona, a prominent MySQL consulting and support company.

'Existing application-performance monitoring products are good at telling you that your database has a performance problem, but most of them come up short in terms of diagnostics and actual remedies,' Schwartz added. 'We feel we are filling a critical market niche as 'big data' becomes a reality for more and more Web businesses.'

Schwartz started VividCortex with co-founder Kyle Redinger last year after seeing first-hand, as a consultant, many consumer-Internet companies struggling with Web-performance issues as the volumes of data they processed grew exponentially. Schwartz and Redinger set out to offer highly intelligent tools to manage complex systems at the server and database level, instead of just for specific applications and networks.

'Over the past five years SaaS monitoring tools have revolutionized the Web and application tiers of the enterprise stack, but the database has remained a black box,' said Alex Benik, a principal at Battery. 'I'm excited to work with Baron and the VividCortex team as they address what is, more often than not, the root cause of many application-performance issues.'

Schwartz is the author of 'High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups and Replication', a well-known book about MySQL database management published by O'Reilly Media.