MariaDB inhales $25m. 'People tried to get away with simpler' but now there's a 'relational renaissance,' says open-source biz chief
- Reference: 1594299906
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/09/mariadb_25_million_investment/
- Source link:
Speaking to The Register , Michael Howard claimed a "renaissance" in relational databases was taking place.
"It started a couple of years ago with the aftermath of the debacle regarding (distributed file system) Hadoop and some non-SQL cousins of ours.
"People tried to get away with simpler APIs; people started saying that you don't need schemas; people said, 'Oh, you can put all your data in a simple document and you don't need to do any joining of data'. "I think the realisation that that was naive and juvenile started a number of years ago, and so the interest in MariaDB," he said.
The new investment, coming from SmartFin, a Belgian firm, and London-Swedish fund GPBullHound, would be solely dedicated to its [1]cloud native SkySQL product , without waiting until the next formal round.
People started saying that you don't need schemas... you can put all your data in a simple document... you don't need to do any joining of data... I think the realisation that that was naive and juvenile started a number of years ago
In May, [2]MariaDB launched its first full DBaaS in SkySQL Power , which supported more custom database requirements into a deployment than other comparable services, the company said.
Let's slip into something a bit more relational: SQL database crowd strikes back with brace of cloudy releases [3]READ MORE
Howard said he expected the DBaaS to complement DBA skills and help them manage every increase in workloads in the cloud, analogous to SaaS for application teams.
In March, MariaDB [4]updated its cloud-native SkySQL database , promising a slew of features addressing deployment, management and analytics. Designed to support cloud-neutral and hybrid installations, it uses Kubernetes for container services to allow deployment of the same database, whether in AWS, Azure, GCP or on-premises.
Open-source MariaDB was sharded out of MySQL, the open-source relational database. MySQL had been part of Sun Microsystems since 2008, but when Oracle bought Sun in 2010, MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius forked the code to a new open-source database: MariaDB.
Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database. But MariaDB Corporation, the company, is building features that support analytics for both offline and live data.
The new funding takes the total investment in the firm to $125m. Although customers include Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, and Verizon, it is still currently small fry compared with multi-billion dollar behemoth like [5]Oracle .
Appointed [6]just over four years ago , Oracle and EMC alumnus [7]Howard told us in late 2018 that the company "aspir[ed] to go public", adding that "revenue", specifically "cloud revenue – is extremely important". ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/31/mariadb_skysql/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/relational_dbs_strike_back_with/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/relational_dbs_strike_back_with/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/31/mariadb_skysql/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/24/mariadb_tx_3_point_0/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/21/mariadb_acquires_9m_in_funding_ceo_and_monty_as_cto/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/13/michael_howard_mariadb_interview/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database.
Not to be pedantic but this article is about MariaDB, not Mysql. MariaDB always had XtraDB or InnoDB as the default engine, not MyISAM.
Re: Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database.
In context I think the quote applies to the pre-fork ancestry of Maria.
Re: Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database.
ISTR inodb was available as an option quite early on - ISTR using it mid 90s on Linux to piss off my systems manager because I could get stuff to run a lot faster than SQLServer4.5 on bigger faster machines.
Re: Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database.
Maybe, but it was slow (compared to essentially constraint-free MyASM), buggy and unreliable and, therefore, not officially supported.
Webscale
[1]But is it webscale? (language a bit NSFW)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
NoSQL vs SQL - seriously, it's based on the need
I've done both the 'simple text file' method AND SQL databases for decades. It's really all based on the need.
If you have a bunch of text data, you can often use simple command line tools and shell scripts. Sometimes that makes the most sense. I've done a lot of analysis on data like that.
Sometimes the SQL utility can be used to 'spit out' the columns of data that another tool can crunch to provide charts, etc. and now you have a 'hybrid' solution that is controlled with a shell script or PHP backend.
It's all based on what the needs are. Having to pick one or the other isn't very creative.
(My preference is PostgreSQL though, for the SQL side)
Main point, of course, is that one or the other solution isn't "superior", just different.
(the most fun solution I did, multiple times in fact, was to create a series of time-based 3D charts from x,y,z text data using gnuplot, then string them together into a video using mencoder's "bunch of jpegs" feature, and play the video to watch the changes in the chart output over time. Built with shell scripts. at the end I added background music to the video to make it more fun. However, watching the video led me to discover a software bug in how the IMU data was being interpreted. Who knew?)
"I think the realisation that that was naive and juvenile started a number of years ago"
The thing about naive and juvenile is that there's always a new batch coming along.
Historically, it had been used mostly as a transactional database.
Not really, MySQL was for a long time not at all ACID compliant and even when it did add support for it, it wasn't very good: slow with global locking. MySQL was optmised for fast writes from the get go, so basically the same space as the NoSQL toys of today.