The power of analytics - for free

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:

• Modern data warehousing: Traditional data warehouses have proven to be complex and expensive. Hadoop implementations have fallen short with the lack of real-time analytics. Many public cloud options are expensive and difficult to integrate with transactional data. MariaDB Community Server 10.5 delivers a modern data warehousing solution for interactive, ad hoc analytics on low-cost, cloud object storage. MariaDB leverages a cloud-native, disaggregated architecture for analytics using an API compatible with AWS S3 object storage for up to 70% cost savings over block storage, 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability, storage across multiple availability zones, and unlimited storage capacity.
• Smart transactions: Modern applications require access to vast amounts of data optimized for analytical queries and machine learning models so that transactions can be augmented with data-driven insights – transforming standard transactions into smart transactions. MariaDB Community Server 10.5 enables the use of row and columnar storage together in one database, making it easy to turn every transaction into a smart transaction, augmented by data and insights from vast amounts of additional data. Developers can now quickly deliver modern applications by leveraging their existing skill sets, including standard SQL, to blend transactions and analytics – previously only achievable with expensive legacy systems and hardware.
• Faster analytical queries for growing datasets: Applications experiencing a surge in users and transactions result in rapidly growing databases with changing query patterns, complex indexes to avoid performance problems and slow query times – all of which impact customer experience. The situation often grows worse when reports or analytical queries need to run at the same time. Separating active transactional data and historical data by moving unused data to columnar tables dramatically reduces the time for analytical queries and immediately restores performance to the application.

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.

• Supporting data analysis with Python: Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It has long been used for web development, but recently has seen a surge in use for data analysis. According to the Python Software Foundation’s 2019 developer survey, 59% of respondents stated they use Python for data analysis, followed by web development at 51% and machine learning at 40%. The native MariaDB connector makes it easy and fast for anyone running data analysis using Python to connect to transactional and analytical data stored in MariaDB.
• Power BI integration for powerful analysis and data visualization: MariaDB makes data analysis and visualization even easier with a new integration with Microsoft’s Power BI. With the new adapter, Power BI users can quickly analyze and aggregate data natively in MariaDB then run interactive reports that are highly visual and easy to share within the business.