MariaDB Xpand 6 improves performance of operational analytics
MariaDB Corporation released Xpand 6 with significant new features, all in the pursuit of maximizing performance.
With fast operational analytics, Xpand now has the smarts to eliminate the need and inconsistencies of loading data to operational data warehouses. Faster parallel data replication across global regions is putting global deployments in everyone’s reach.
As businesses around the world face unpredictable demand and change, they need a database that handles surprise increases in transactions and more diverse workloads while maintaining strict data consistency and availability.
MariaDB Xpand is a fully distributed SQL database with a shared nothing architecture. Unlike AWS Aurora’s storage replication or Postgres’ read replication, Xpand is a true multi-writer, any node can be written to and adds scale for reads and writes.
Columnar perspective
Columnar data models are popular for ad hoc analytics and perform well on large amounts of data. Xpand is the first modern distributed SQL database supporting this powerful feature for online-transaction processing. Xpand uses columnar indexes for real-time operational analytics directly on transactional data, without losing consistency or missing the latest transactions.
The new columnar feature enables companies to run ad hoc queries in Xpand with speeds up to 50x faster. Best performance is guaranteed as the fully cost based optimizer will determine the faster path, columnar or not. Applications immediately benefit from the new feature without any changes after columnar indexes have been activated.
Developers can leverage this new feature to provide smarter applications, better user experiences and personal analytics giving their application users the latest status and insights on all data changes that may impact them.
Parallel replication
With parallel replication, Xpand implements the equivalent of a multi-lane highway for asynchronous replication of data across geo-locations. The data replication is done independently by each node in the cluster, which increases throughput at lower latency. Xpand provides transactional consistency by maintaining the order of transaction during replication. Powered by Xpand 6, customers can deploy their global applications across regions and cloud vendors to survive any hyperscaler outages.
“With these key new features in Xpand, developers get to broaden their use of analytics in applications without having to worry about performance, at the same time supporting the capability is literally effortless for the database administrators,” said Robbie Mihalyi, senior vice president of engineering at MariaDB Corporation. “The parallel replication capabilities have been shaped by our customers and their business needs, giving them maximum data transfer speeds at minimal latency and control over their data flows.”