MariaDB Corp. announced Tuesday new product enhancements to MariaDB AX, delivering a modern approach to data warehousing that enables customers to perform fast and scalable analytics with better price performance over proprietary solutions.
MariaDB AX expands the MariaDB Server, creating a solution that enables high performance analytics with distributed storage and parallel processing, and that scales with existing commodity hardware on premises or across any cloud platform. With MariaDB AX, data across every facet of the business is transformed into meaningful and actionable results.
MariaDB AX includes new features that enable easy, high performance data analytics, by making data available for analysis quickly and easily. MariaDB AX, with the introduction of data adapters and direct access to the underlying storage engine, removes the need for complex, time-consuming batch processes to import data. By reducing the time it takes to make data available for analysis, organizations can realize a faster time-to-insight and the competitive advantages it brings.
New data adapters include features to develop applications and services to continuously collect and write large amounts of data to MariaDB AX for analysis, or publish machine learning results to MariaDB AX for data scientists and others to view or further analyze via SQL. It also analyzes operational data in near real time, within seconds of being created. When MariaDB TX is deployed for operational workloads, the data adapter uses MariaDB MaxScale and change-data-capture streams to replicate data from the operational environment to MariaDB AX automatically and continuously.
Currently available for download, the offering combines and analyzes data from multiple sources by aggregating data from web, mobile and Internet of Things applications. The data adapter, currently in beta, consumes messages published to Apache Kafka topics and writes the data to MariaDB AX, enabling data scientists to analyze related data from multiple sources. It also extends analytical capabilities of MariaDB AX by creating custom analytical functions for relational and non-relational data such as JSON.
The introduction of an API for creating user-defined aggregate and window functions, combined with support for text and binary data, enables data scientists to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data using custom analytical functions.
The offering also ensures data is always available for analysis and simplify the process of backing up and restoring data. MariaDB AX adds support for GlusterFS to provide data high availability without the need for an expensive SAN, while a new tool automatically uses multiple, concurrent connections to backup and restore distributed data on multiple servers from a single location.
Data warehouses are traditionally expensive and complex to operate. Driven by the need for more meaningful and timely analytics that meet hardware and cost pressures, companies are reassessing their data warehouse and analytics strategy. Built for performance and scalability, MariaDB AX uses a distributed and columnar open source storage engine with parallel query processing that allows customers to store more data and analyze it faster.
MariaDB AX supports a wide range of advanced analytic use cases across every industry, for example, identifying health trends to inform healthcare programs and policy, behavioral analysis to inform customer service and sales strategies, and analysis of financial anomalies to inform fraud programs.
“MariaDB AX is a powerful, open source solution for performing custom and complex analytics,” said David Thompson, VP of Engineering at MariaDB Corporation. “In order to fully realize the power of big data, our customers need the ability to gather insights in near real time, regardless of where the data is coming from. With MariaDB AX, it’s easier than ever to ingest and analyze streaming data from disparate sources, while ensuring the highest level of reliability through new high availability and backup capabilities.”
“Like so many organizations today, for us, data is the lifeblood of our operations,” said Patrice Linel, Head of Scientific Computing at Genus plc, parent company of ABS Global and PIC, helping farmers produce better quality meat and milk more efficiently and sustainably. “With the new data ingestion capabilities in MariaDB AX, we are freed from the manual, time-consuming practice of moving massive amounts of genetic data from its source format for analysis. Now with MariaDB AX, we can queue and instantly move data directly from Python into MariaDB where real-time analytics happens. The effort saved is substantial and the data is always the most current.”
