See Columnar Storage for Analytics in Action and Get an Overview of MariaDB Community Server 10.5

One of the most notable changes in MariaDB Community Server 10.5 is the addition of ColumnStore as a pluggable storage engine. With this addition, analytics is available to millions of users deploying the open source MariaDB community version for free. Sure, that sounds good, but how easy is it to actually use? If you want to see it in action before downloading MariaDB Community Server 10.5 for yourself, take a look at our recent webinar.

In the webinar (which also includes an overview of the new features in MariaDB Community Server 10.5), I explain why columnar storage is so fast and useful for analytics. And then configuring ColumnStore, I show how it can be used either by itself for analytical workloads, or be combined with row-based transactional storage to create smart transactions using OLTP and OLAP together.

Using ColumnStore in MariaDB Community Server

ColumnStore with MariaDB Community Server 10.5 is available as a Docker image, and using the Docker image and an accompanying GitHub repo can get you going quickly.  Scripts are provided that create the schema and load the data into the tables. In the created ColumnStore instance, nearly 700K records of flight data are loaded in 90ms using MariaDB’s cpimport utility. With the schema and data in place, a query for the average flight delay across all 700K records returns results in just 70ms.

Using the same Docker image, I also demonstrate how easy it is to configure async replication from row-based InnoDB to column-based ColumnStore, just as you might want to do to offload data from your transactional database to your analytical one. And, I throw in a couple of cross engine JOINs. Extending this stack for reporting, I also show how you can use MariaDB’s Power BI direct query adapter to use Power BI functionality without the necessity of pulling the data into Power BI.

New Features in Community Server 10.5

The inclusion of ColumnStore in MariaDB Community Server 10.5 has been a game-changer, providing everyone access to try out a columnar database and smart transactions, but there are many other significant changes in MariaDB Community Server 10.5.

My colleague Max Mether, VP of Server Product Management at MariaDB, provides a brief tour of some of the most significant changes present in MariaDB Community Server 10.5:

  • Temporal table improvements
  • Added SQL functionality
  • Improved parallel replication
  • New security features
  • Major rewrite of InnoDB storage engine

If you’re interested in hearing more about the InnoDB rewrite, we also recommend Marko Makela’s OpenWorks 2020 webinar and our documentation for a more detailed look. Marko also wrote an InnoDB features blog.

The webinar is now available on-demand. I think you’ll find it a worthwhile watch.

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