MariaDB® Corporation has announced the general availability of MariaDB Community Server 10.5, a major new release that brings high-performance analytics to the hands of millions using the popular open source database. In a push to mainstream analytics and to make it as popular as MariaDB’s transactional engine, the company added a new, native columnar storage engine to the community database server and a new, native MariaDB Python Connector and Microsoft Power BI integration. Together, these new capabilities provide traditional MariaDB users and data scientists around the world with powerful analytics. All new analytical capabilities in MariaDB Community Server 10.5 are available for free with unrestricted use to broaden adoption of hybrid transactional and analytical processing, and modern analytical approaches.
MariaDB is one of the top five most used databases globally with a user base of tens of millions. It has replaced MySQL as the default on nearly all major Linux distributions and has been downloaded over one billion times on Docker Hub. With the release of MariaDB Community Server 10.5, MariaDB users can extend the traditional transactional capabilities of the database to now perform interactive analytics at scale on hundreds of billions of rows.
“Data analytics are a core component of any modern application,” said Gregory Dorman, vice president of distributed systems and analytics, MariaDB Corporation. “Customers expect applications to give them insights, historical comparisons, predictions and automation in order to make better, smarter decisions and deliver a more intuitive experience. With the new native, fully integrated analytical capabilities, MariaDB community users now have an out-of-the-box, cost-effective solution for storing and accessing massive amounts of data in split seconds. It will transform how everyone around the world views and uses MariaDB to start building modern everyday applications.”
MariaDB’s modern architecture enables new flexibility
MariaDB achieves high-performance analytics using MariaDB ColumnStore, which stores data in a columnar format for up to 10x data compression on disk and uses parallel query to perform interactive analytics in real time. MariaDB first released ColumnStore in 2016 and has delivered significant advancements in the technology to add additional performance improvements, streaming capabilities, faster import and query times, and cloud-native storage. Over the years, ColumnStore has grown in popularity and received several community contributions, including a new data type for TIMESTAMP. By integrating ColumnStore as a native storage engine in MariaDB Server - similar to other native storage engines such as InnoDB, MyRocks, Spider and Aria - users can simply add columnar tables to existing databases to introduce or supercharge analytics while improving transactional performance. Benefits include:
Even more options to connect and analyze data in MariaDB
MariaDB Server is compatible with the widely used MySQL database protocol and therefore supports native integrations with all leading BI and data analysis tools and frameworks. This compatibility also enables access to data in any MariaDB storage engine, including ColumnStore. In addition, MariaDB released two new, native connectors to make data analysis with MariaDB easier and faster.