Open source database vendor MariaDB has revealed its big data analytics engine, ColumnStore.
MariaDB ColumnStore is a columnar storage engine for massively parallel distributed query execution and data loading. The engine is designed to support use cases such as real-time, batch, and algorithmic analytics.
The company says that this is the industry’s first to enable transactional and massively parallelised analytic workloads under the same roof. Something which has been made possible by MariaDB’s extensible architecture that allows simultaneous use of purpose built storage engines.
Columnar database technology can be used for a number of different reasons including helping to give customers insight into how to grow revenue and protect against fraud.
Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB "I’ve seen first-hand how traditional columnar appliances arose as reactions to the cost and complexity of Oracle.
"But these reactions have only increased complexity and cost further, and most importantly, over-looked critical features."
Howard says that MariaDB’s ColumnStore by contrast is ACID compliant, extremely fast and uses a distributed storage engine.
In addition to the ColumnStore, the company also revealed a data streaming capability in MariaDB MaxScale that is designed to simplify real-time data propagation to external data lakes or data warehouses.
The feature will allow transactions in MariaDB to be replicated in real time to Hadoop or any other data store. This also allows for MaxScale and MariaDB to be configured to handle replication in mission critical applications without impact on performance while including all necessary metadata so that any program can read it, with no per-value overhead.
Michael "Monty" Widenius, CTO, MariaDB said: "Big data analytics is a priority for businesses that need to scale their analytics capabilities and extract greater value from growing data volumes."
MariaDB has recently been boosted by new equity investment from SmartFin Capital which provided an additional $3m, bringing the company’s extended B round to $12m.
The open-source relational database vendor has been busy recently with the appointment of a new CEO, Michael Howard, in January, and a customer win with BlaBlaCar.
In February it was revealed that the ride-sharing service is using MariaDB to help meet scale requirements as it expands globally.
ColumnStore will be available to beta test in May this year.