MariaDB plc today announced the immediate availability of a new release of its SkySQL cloud database-as-a-service with features that help organizations better manage their cloud costs.

Most significant is that SkySQL now enables autoscaling, which allocates resources according to demand to scale both up and down as needed and thereby protect customers from overpaying for unneeded capacity. This version also introduces serverless analytics that the company says works on current data without the need for extract/transform/load procedures.

The new version is “tuned and optimized for the most rigorous of situations,” Jags Ramnarayan, senior vice president and general manager of SkySQL, said in a statement. He cited the distributed SQL capability of MariaDB’s Xpand database that makes it “easy to operate, monitor, run analytics and scale elastically.”

MariaDB is a drop-in open-source replacement for MySQL, which is owned by Oracle Corp. It is currently the 12^th most popular database management system on SolidIT Consulting & Software Development gmbh’s DB-Engines ranking but has been climbing quickly. SkySQL, which is the managed version of MariaDB, was one of the first DbaaS to support row, columnar and combined row and columnar storage, a technique that enables transaction and analytical processing to be combined on the same data set.

Autoscaling parameters

SkySQL enables autoscaling of both compute and storage resources in response to changes in demand, the company said. Rules defined by the customer specify when scaling actions are triggered. For example, parameters can be defined so that when CPU utilization exceeds 75% over all replicas for 30 minutes a new replica or node is automatically added.

Conversely, when sustained CPU utilization drops below 50% for an hour, nodes can be downgraded. Xpand on SkySQL combines autoscaling with distributed node deployment to add or subtract nodes automatically as needed.

SkySQL’s ability to run operational analytics on transactional data — a capability sometimes called “translytical” — was first enabled in 2019 and has now been boosted by a serverless analytics layer powered by Apache Spark SQL. This approach removes inconsistencies between analytical and transactional views and only requires users to pay for the functions they use.

For data scientists, access to an Apache Zeppelin notebook is provided with pre-loaded examples of techniques to run analytics on data stored in SkySQL. It can also be used to discover database schemas, run queries on data stored in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 object storage, and federate queries to join data across SkySQL and S3 data sets.

The new release of SkySQL is now generally available on AWS and Google LLC’s Cloud and includes Xpand 6.1.1, MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.6.12 and ColumnStore 6.3.1.

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