MariaDB closes analytics and transactions gap with Platform X3

MariaDB closes analytics and transactions gap with Platform X3

MariaDB has unleashed its eponymous Platform X3 into general availability, along with a Managed Service which will support public and hybrid cloud deployments.

The product combines the MariaDB TX and MariaDB AX lines. The former handles transactions, the latter analytics, and together, the company says, “transactional applications can retain unlimited historical data and leverage powerful, real-time analytics.”

In a canned statement, MariaDB Corp CEO Michael Howard said, “Public cloud service offerings have fallen short in helping companies succeed across their diverse cloud and on-prem environments.”

He wasn’t shy about naming names, adding “Unlike Amazon RDS and Aurora, MariaDB delivers a wide range of flexibility for our customers. Flexibility in the types of workloads supported, in how MariaDB is deployed, in how the database is configured, and now with MariaDB Platform X3, the flexibility to use any combination of transactions and analytics. Nothing else comes close.”

The company claimed its Managed Service went beyond standard (rival) offerings, “by providing proactive monitoring, migration, schema changes, query optimization, performance tuning and security updates.” By using MariaDBs own experts to staff the service, it claimed it would be going the “extra mile” beyond “cloud vendors that limit technical support to database operations issues.”

AWS and Azure both offer existing services supporting MariaDB deployments, as well as their own RDS and Aurora products respectively. MariaDB posted a handy sheet detailing exactly where it reckons RDS and Aurora come up short.

More to the point, as an open source database MariaDB is leaping into a suddenly rather fractious market. Fellow open source datamonger MongoDB announced last year it would offer new versions of its database under a server side public license, forcing anyone offering a MongoDB-based cloud service to disclose the source code behind the service.

AWS’s response last week was to launch a Mongo compatible database Amazon DocumentDB. It relies on the older MongoDB 3.6 APIs, but if enough users decide that’s good enough for the convenience of operating on AWS that could have, let’s say, implications for companies looking to provide full bells and whistles databases on their own terms.