The company claims SkySQL delivers the experience customers have been waiting for: fully featured, fully customisable and backed by support and expertise from the engineers who built it.

"The universal need for accessible yet robust database services has never been higher - for around-the-clock critical operations and simplified analytics for a changing world," said MariaDB CEO Michael Howard.

"Existing services, long in the tooth, lock out community innovation, meaning patches, new versions and features are missing for literally years. MariaDB SkySQL is a next-generation cloud database, built by the world's top database engineers in the industry, allowing organisations large and small to know they have an always-on partner to not only roll out new applications, but ensure a consistent and enduring quality of service."

According to MariaDB, SkySQL is capable of supporting mission-critical workloads; is based on the latest version of the MariaDB platform; provides row, columnar, and combined row and columnar storage; and comes with the same support and peace of mind on-premises MariaDB customers currently enjoy.

"A DBaaS direct from the source means customers get the added benefit of influencing feature decisions and revenue is reinvested back into MariaDB innovation," the company said.

In addition, MariaDB offers cloud database administrator (DBA) support for the SkySQL DBaaS.

"Our initial testing showed better than expected performance with SkySQL on Google Cloud Platform," said Telefónica UK head of engineering for O2 Enterprise and Wi-Fi Paul Greaves.

"MariaDB SkySQL will open up new opportunities for us to iterate faster and provide a better experience for our customers."

SkySQL takes advantage of Kubernetes for container orchestration; ServiceNow for inventory, configuration and workflow management; and Prometheus and Grafana for real-time monitoring and visualisation.

It is designed for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, so customers aren't locked into one public cloud vendor's ecosystem. However, SkySQL is initially available on Google Cloud Platform, with prices starting at US$0.45 per hour.