Apple has quietly—and not so quietly—been buying up Big Datacompanies over the past few years, most recently acquiring FoundationDB but in 2013 also purchasing Acunu, maker of a real-time analytics platform. The intent seems to be to purchase data infrastructure talent—and very particular talent at that.
Basically, Apple needed to get into NoSQL database technology in a bad way. These alternatives to traditional relational databases (long known as SQL systems) offer speed and flexibility that older-style databases can only dream of.