Cruise.co.uk Sets Sail with MariaDB SkySQL Cloud Database and SkyDBA

SkySQL picked for its performance, easy migration and cost savings

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – September 29, 2022 – MariaDB® Corporation today announced that Cruise.co.uk, a leading online cruise travel agent in the UK, has booked MariaDB SkySQL as its fully managed cloud database service. With SkySQL, Cruise.co.uk gains big benefits with seamless migration and faster performance. Furthermore, SkyDBAs serve as their personal consultants for 24/7 proactive, expert care of its databases, enabling Cruise.co.uk to reduce costs and focus on booking their customers the best cruise deals.

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Cruise.co.uk brings people from all over the world together with the best cruise deals, news and reviews. “We operate at an enterprise level with high amounts of business critical data,” said Matt Mills, IT director, Cruise.co.uk. “There were increased concerns around disaster recovery and risk management. It was time to migrate to the cloud and we wanted to stay with MariaDB. We evaluated other DBaaS options during our search. But we ultimately chose SkySQL because of the value we get with MariaDB SkyDBA. Having the ability to tap into senior DBAs was the driving factor for our decision. No other product was comparable, particularly for an SMB like us that doesn’t have infinite DBA resources in-house.”

Cost-savings with fractional DBAs

Running as a lean team, Cruise.co.uk gains personal consultants with SkyDBA. Being at a fraction of the cost, SkyDBAs are phenomenal for organizations that do not have database experts on staff. The automation with SkySQL paired with the expert database support of SkyDBA enables Cruise.co.uk to focus more of its resources on evolving and developing new product offerings. With SkyDBA, Cruise.co.uk receives day-to-day operational help and has access to a team of experts able to dive in to solve any challenge. 

“With SkyDBAs on hand, our production migration was a simple process that took us only a few minutes; it was very smooth and completely hassle-free,” said Mills. “Our SkyDBAs have done an excellent job at suggesting options and making changes to our setup that optimizes our operations and performance. We saw an average page load improvement of around 30%, and with some specific slow pages it improved by over 400%. During an unfortunate data center outage, our SkyDBA team quickly put a plan in place to get us up in a new region. We would never have had that level of problem-solving and action with any other vendor. We couldn’t be happier with our decision to have SkySQL with SkyDBA to support our business.”

SkySQL is MariaDB’s fully managed cloud database service. As a push-button solution, it takes care of everything from provisioning the cloud infrastructure to installing and deploying the database, configuring the database for production environments, and automating failover. SkySQL is capable of scaling out a single database to hundreds of nodes with ease using distributed SQL and can deploy modern data warehouses for ad hoc analytics on massive data sets to meet enterprise demands – all while saving customers up to 90% of their legacy database costs. 

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About MariaDB

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB™.