BlaBlaCar is using MariaDB to help meet scale requirements as it expands globally.

The ride-sharing service that holds more than 90% share in Germany, Spain and Italy is used more than seven million times a month, which has caused it to struggle with storing and protecting data.

To combat this it has turned to open source database vendor MariaDB to help manage 1.5 terabytes of data.

MariaDB was chosen to help ensure performance and total availability allowing the ride-sharing service to quickly and flexibly acquire new data sources.

The environment that is being run includes nearly 250 physical servers along with a hundred virtual machines that are spread across two datacentres. The vendor’s Enterprise Cluster is designed to give BlaBlaCar control over the consistency, reliability and scalability of its database applications.

Multi-source replication provided by MariaDB is being used to simplify the delivery of aggregated data for Business Intelligence via the indexing engine Elastic Search.

Nicolas Blanc, Head of Platform Architecture at BlaBlaCar, said: ”Among the key criteria for us was technical expertise and the speed of response. BlaBlaCar did not hesitate to engage with MariaDB. Its technology is proven, we trust them and the service is excellent.”

The ride-sharing service carries 10 million passengers per quarter and has 25 million members across 22 countries including India and most recently Brazil.

Because of its quick growth, the European ‘Unicorn’ was valued in September last year at $1.5bn following a funding round that saw it raise €180 million, in total it has raised over $300 million in funding.

The plan is for the company to expand into new markets, making MariaDB core to this expansion with the management of its databases.

MariaDB is a provider of open-source database solutions for SaaS, Cloud, and on-premises applications; it is included in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Rackspace and is the database of choice for IBM POWER8.

The vendor has recently appointed a new CEO in Michael Howard who told CBR that the company’s recent $9m in funding would be spent towards making sure brand awareness gets out and building up the field and customer success organisation.

Howard said: "It is enlarging and building up the field and customer success organisation because that’s obviously very important. The third element of the funding is to allow us to execute the vision for security and OLAP features."