Thank you, Amazon, for inspiring us to deliver a better DBaaS: SkySQL

Today marks a new milestone for MariaDB with the launch of SkySQL, a next-generation cloud database that combines powerful enterprise features and world-class database support with groundbreaking innovation. 

There is someone in particular that’s worth thanking at this moment – Amazon. They pioneered the first generation of databases on the internet. But in classic retail fashion they simply strip-mined the best of open source databases, and made it available on their shelf without an ability to innovate on the database itself. Databases are some of the most complex software products today. Wrapping open source databases with proprietary technology to deliver the AWS RDS service essentially locked out the community, and made it very difficult even for Amazon to keep the core database technology up to date and evolving. Because of this lockout, all versions of AWS RDS and Aurora are years behind the database technology available today. Bug fixes and security updates are missing despite being readily available. They certainly got the ball rolling in terms of making the public cloud a staple for everyone using databases, but by not partnering with the open source database creators they missed a critical opportunity. 

We’ve heard from many customers who have experienced heartache with RDS and Aurora. Whether it’s entire applications that went down during business-critical moments for Fortune 500 companies, downright comical support responses or scalability and performance that do not meet business requirements. 

We feel there is an opportunity and a customer need that we had to respond to with an alternative.

With SkySQL cloud database, you get true high availability and write scalability. You get the newest version of MariaDB and the latest innovations. You get a modern architecture that’s designed for multi- and hybrid cloud. You get one database service organizing data in rows and columns for transactions, and analytics turning every transaction into a smart transaction that benefits from analytical queries, models and algorithms running against billions of rows of data in fractions of a second. You get access to database expertise from the source, the team that engineers MariaDB. 

And when you use SkySQL, the investment you make goes straight back into MariaDB innovation – innovation that you and the entire MariaDB community benefit from. We invite you to experience SkySQL for yourself. Get started with SkySQL today.

And maybe one day the good folks at Amazon will do what they do best, build amazing cloud infrastructure and leave it to the database creators to do what they do best: engineer databases that power amazing applications on prem and in the cloud. Heck, that could even turn into an amazing partnership.