MariaDB, the new generation cloud database company, is announcing the latest release of MariaDB SkySQL, introducing innovations such as autoscaling and serverless analytics. As a second generation cloud database service, SkySQL promises to deliver enhanced resilience and scalability—with its flagship distributed SQL product, MariaDB Xpand—while reducing cloud costs.
The capabilities at the forefront of this announcement—autoscaling and serverless analytics—enable enterprises to scale resources as demand fluctuates, while revealing insights on current data without the need for ETL. Users only pay for what’s used, further saving on cloud costs.
As the world grows increasingly real-time with an automatic expectation of quality service, the services and applications they access must meet these extraordinary demands. SkySQL, which promises resilience, elasticity, and performance, allows enterprises to achieve these requisites with deep database expertise accompanied by cloud-native technology, according to the vendor.
“At our heart, we are a database company,” said Jags Ramnarayan, SVP and SkySQL general manager at MariaDB plc. “We take that deep-rooted experience and knowledge to offer a cloud database service that is tuned and optimized for the most rigorous of situations. SkySQL brings hard-hitting capabilities, such as distributed SQL with our Xpand database, and we make it incredibly easy to operate, monitor, run analytics, and scale elastically, all while being able to control your cloud spend. With other clouds, costs tend to only go one way—up. With SkySQL, we let you shrink the cost footprint automatically when demand is low.”
SkySQL’s autoscaling capability introduces a world of possibility in regard to performance; with the autoscaling of both compute and storage in response to changes in demand, SkySQL employs rules that specify when a node or replica is removed or added. There are no cost surprises; users specify the top and bottom threshold to ensure consistency in autoscaling execution.
Leveraging Xpand, MariaDB’s distributed SQL database, further enhances SkySQL’s autoscaling, which accommodates unexpected spikes in demand. If your users double, triple, or quadruple in quantity, Xpand on SkySQL with autoscale turned on automatically adds nodes to handle that amount of demand. Once the demand level drops, the number of nodes is reduced, guaranteeing that enterprises only pay for the resources being used.
"Our first look at the new MariaDB SkySQL release left us very impressed, especially with the user interface and autoscaling capabilities," said John Hundley, principal software engineer at Hughes Network Systems. "Our IoT smart power plugs are distributed nationally across hundreds of locations, collecting data from various plugs at any given time. The number of locations and data rates can vary significantly. The user interface is very easy to use and will give us a better view into our database usage; we expect autoscaling to help us in responding to our workload changes to ensure we have the right resources allocated."
SkySQL’s serverless analytics removes ETL from the operational analytics process; powered by APache Spark SQL, SkySQL performs analytics on active transactional data, as well as external data, with a serverless analytics layer. Organizations pay only for the CPU consumed for analytics, without the need to provision compute.
Analytics and transactional views are synched, eliminating any inconsistencies. SkySQL’s analytics layer can further discover databases schemas, run queries on data stored in Amazon S3, and federate queries to join data across SkySQL databases and S3 object storage.
“Cloud-native DBMSs, such as MariaDB SkySQL, use dynamic compute and storage, making their use of resources more efficient and enabling them to deliver optimal performance,” said Carl Olofson, senior vice president, IDC. “The choice of which cloud-native DBMS to use comes down to fit. SkySQL offers scale and availability, the ability to run in multiple clouds, and to handle both OLTP and OLAP workloads. It also leverages skills that are transferable to all clouds. If these qualities are important to you, SkySQL is a cloud-native DBMS to consider.”
The latest iteration of SkySQL is now generally available on AWS and Google Cloud.
To learn more about the new release of MariaDB SkySQL, please visit https://mariadb.com/.