MariaDB expands Open Source Database for SaaS and Cloud

According to research by Wikibon, the Big Data database market (SQL and NoSQL), a subset of the total database market, is predicted to reach $4.5 billion in 2017[1], up from $2.7 billion in 2014, based on their role in Big Data solutions. SQL will represent 64% of the database market in 2017. In addition, a 2014 forecast from 451 Research shows revenue for the open-source database segment (a component of the overall Big Data database market) to be close to $3 billion in 2016[2]. Web-scale enterprises, notably SaaS application requirements, demand database solutions that support flexibility, performance, scalability, business continuity and interoperability across SQL and NoSQL.

“Businesses continue to struggle with the endless growth of traditional databases in terms of size, number, and cost, and are looking for alternatives to better meet the enterprise requirements of new SaaS applications, said Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst at ESG for Big Data, Analytics and Data Management. “MariaDB offers an attractive open source approach, which has recently been enhanced to improve scalability, performance, availability and security.”

MariaDB Enterprise, which is provided as a subscription, includes curated and hardened server binaries based on the leading open source MariaDB community server, along with a selection of tools, connectors and subscription services to address the needs of mission-critical applications. MariaDB Enterprise also offers users the option to deploy MariaDB MaxScale™, a database-aware proxy platform that provides capabilities such as load balancing, sharding and firewall protection without the need to modify existing applications.

With over 400 collective years of MySQL-related experience, the MariaDB engineering team continues to expand the capabilities of the MariaDB Enterprise and MaxScale subscription to support enterprise-grade deployments. With the Spring 2015 release, MariaDB Enterprise introduces:
Optimized server binaries that can increase overall database performance by more than 15%; these binaries are the result of careful profiling and optimizing for typical use cases
Enhanced HA (high availability) and scalability on the highly cost-effective IBM POWER8 architecture supported by Galera clustering
Expanded choice of supported operating systems - RHEL 7.1 (little endian), SLES 12 and Ubuntu 14.04 binaries for the IBM POWER8 architecture
Enhanced customer experience with online subscription management now available via the MariaDB Customer Portal
MariaDB MaxScale, an optional add-on to the MariaDB Enterprise subscription, is a configurable database proxy platform for scalability, reliability and database security. It insulates applications from changes in the database deployment environments while handling scale-out architectures and improving availability. Its flexible architecture comes with a rich set of out-of-the-box plugins for protocol support, database monitoring, routing, filtering and logging of incoming requests and authentications. With the Spring 2015 release, the following new MaxScale capabilities are added:
Advanced security protection against SQL injection attacks using the Database Firewall Filter to block selected queries
Enhanced scalability via schema-based sharding and a binlog router (designed in collaboration with Booking.com)
Support for industry-standard monitoring with a Nagios Plugin architecture to provide an always-on user experience
Improved security and systems maintenance enabled by timely alerts from MariaDB Enterprise Notification Services

MariaDB Enterprise is based on innovations from the community, merged with the deep enterprise expertise of MariaDB Corporation. The upcoming community MariaDB Server 10.1 is based on rich contributions from the open source community. Notable new features include advanced encryption contributed by Google, who switched from MySQL to MariaDB in 2013. In addition, 10.1 will include fully integrated Galera Cluster 4.0, optimistic parallel replication to boost performance, and several InnoDB enhancements such as multi-threaded flush. MariaDB Corporation continues to work closely with the rest of the community around MariaDB Server to ensure rich innovation and broad adoption.

“The innovative design of the IBM Power Systems with POWER8™ processor technology is for demanding, data-intensive applications. Combining this with the reliability of MariaDB Enterprise MySQL database technology provides web-scale enterprise clients with a solution that offers incredible performance,” said Terri Virnig, Vice President, Power Ecosystem and Strategy, IBM Systems. “We're thrilled to collaborate with MariaDB to provide solutions with open source innovation to address growing volumes of client data that must be quickly and securely accessed and managed.”
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