Analytics for All

Posted on June 24, 2020 by

For too long transactions and analytics have been kept apart. Transactions were shipped off via ETL to a separate data warehouse behind firewalls in the IT basement. With analytics separated, the insights from analytics, trends, patterns and predictions rarely ever found a way to inform transactions because applications couldn’t access these separate data warehouses.

MariaDB started bringing transactions and analytics together with the launch of MariaDB Platform X3. It took heavy lifting and revamping the storage engine API to allow for smart storage engines that would accept push-down of complex queries to finally hitch transactions and powerful analytics tightly together. The ColumnStore storage engine included in MariaDB Community Server 10.5 is our first smart storage engine and will happily live side by side with InnoDB.

In previous community server versions, an instance of MariaDB with ColumnStore had to be dedicated to analytics. Not any more! With InnoDB and ColumnStore running side-by-side as peers, everything changes! Now everyone has access to powerful analytics out-of-the-box with MariaDB Community Server.

Experience the power of columnar analytics today, all open source with free, unrestricted use for:

  • Real time analytics on many hundreds of millions of rows
  • Up to 90% data compression
  • No need for indexes and their time consuming maintenance
  • Storage savings of up to 70% with optional cloud-native object storage
  • Lightning fast data import via cpimport utility

Accessing the data in ColumnStore couldn’t be simpler as MariaDB supports the most popular MySQL protocol, used by tools like Tableau, Pentaho, etc. In addition, MariaDB is providing optimized native integration for Power BI leaving complex queries to be executed in ColumnStore rather than pulling all the data into a Power BI client, which in many cases isn’t feasible due to size. A new, native MariaDB Connector for Python makes it easy and fast for data scientists to connect to data stored in MariaDB.

Just as the open source community has contributed to ColumnStore, we are proud to make this solution available to the broader MariaDB community. While most of the work for ColumnStore has been performed by the engineers of MariaDB Corporation, notable community contributions have included:

  • Support for BOOL/BOOLEAN, MEDIUMINT, and TIMESTAMP data types
  • Improved UTF8 character set support
  • Support for encryption in cross-engine JOINs
  • Enhancements to cpimport, ColumnStore’s high-performance bulk data loader

We are excited to bring these powerful analytical capabilities to the MariaDB community and make them easy to use no matter your use case. Whether you’re looking for a modern data warehousing solution, looking to blend transactions and analytics for smart transactions or looking to increase analytical query performance on growing datasets. MariaDB Community Server just got a whole lot more powerful. Try it out yourself or join our upcoming webinar where we’ll demo the new capabilities using sample apps.

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