MariaDB adds support for big data analytics

MariaDB today moved to unite transactional and analytical processing in a single relational database with the announcement of the general availability of its open source MariaDB ColumnStore 1.0.

“What we’re offering is a single SQL interface for both OLTP and analytics,” says David Thompson, vice president of Engineering at MariaDB.

“MariaDB ColumnStore is the future of data warehousing,” Aziz Vahora, head of Data Management at Pinger, a specialist in mobile communication apps, added in a statement today. “ColumnStore allows us to store more data and analyze it faster. Every day, Pinger’s mobile applications process millions of text messages and phone calls. We also process more than 1.5 billion rows of logs per day. Analytic scalability and performance is critical to our business. MariaDB’s ColumnStore manages massive amounts of data and will scale with Pinger as we grow.”

Complex, massive and parallel

MariaDB ColumnStore brings together transactional and massively parallelized analytical workloads using an extensible architecture that allows simultaneous use of purpose-built storage engines for maximum performance, simplification and cost savings. It’s a columnar storage engine for massively parallel distributed query execution and data loading, supporting use cases ranging from real-time to batch to algorithmic. It’s capable of performing complex aggregation, joins and windowing functions at the data storage level to increase performance.

“Architecturally, that’s something we’re really striving toward as a company: to give our customers and users the ability to choose the right storage engine for their use case,” Thompson says.

“Data warehouses are famously expensive and complex — requiring proprietary hardware which makes it nearly impossible to deploy on the cloud, or on commodity hardware,” Thompson adds. “MariaDB ColumnStore makes data analytics more accessible, on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid deployment.”

On premises or in the cloud

Thompson says that because MariaDB ColumnStore is an open source solution, it provides exponentially better cost per performance for analytics compared with proprietary data warehouse alternatives. Additionally, its flexible deployment options means organizations can deploy in the cloud or on-premises with commodity hardware.

“One of the benchmarks we’re really focusing on is price for performance,” he says. “Looking at running ColumnStore versus incumbent data warehouse solutions, it’s about 90 percent less.”

On the administration and execution front, MariaDB ColumnStore accesses all the same security capabilities delivered in MariaDB Server, including encryption for data-in-motion, role-based access and auditability. It offers out-of-the-box connection with BI tools through ODBC/JDBC and the standard MariaDB connectors.

MariaDB publicly announced MariaDB ColumnStore in April of this year. Since then, Thompson says, the company has focused on building out the capabilities to make it a truly enterprise-ready project, including: AWS support, management capabilities, a migration guide for customers using InfiniDB and more.

“My team has been very focused on compatibility testing,” he adds.

MariaDB ColumnStore is available for download here.