MariaDB Corporation, the database company born as a result of forking the well-known open-source MySQL database, has announced the release of MariaDB ColumnStore 1.0, a columnar storage engine.
The company said with this release it had united transactional and analytic processing providing a single front end to deliver an enterprise-grade solution that simplifies high-performance, big data analytics.
MariaDB ColumnStore would provide lower cost of ownership, better price performance, easier enterprise analytics and faster and more efficient queries, the company claimed.
"Data warehouses are famously expensive and complex – requiring proprietary hardware which makes it nearly impossible to deploy on the cloud, or on commodity hardware. MariaDB ColumnStore makes data analytics more accessible, on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid deployment," said David Thompson, vice-president of engineering at MariaDB.
{loadposition sam08}"Costing on average 90% less per TB per year than the leading data warehouses and offering a scalable solution for the cloud, MariaDB ColumnStore presents a new, open source model for big data analytics that is designed to meet today’s enterprise needs."
MariaDB, set up by well-known MySQL veteran Monty Widenius, was forked at the time when Oracle was acquiring Sun Microsystems.
While MaridDB Columnstore and MariaDB itself are both released under the GNU General Public Licence, the MariaDB MaxScale product is released under what is known as a Business Source Licence with the licensing to switch to the GNU GPL in 2019.
The BSL terms state: "Usage of the software is free when your application uses the software with a total of less than three database server instances for production purposes."
The terms of this licence have caused some disquiet in the open source community.