MariaDB plc today said it will make its Xpand distributed database management system available to PostgreSQL users in addition to its own customer base.

“Our vision is to take databases to new heights of scale and resilience, in any cloud at a fraction of the cost of competitors,” said Chief Executive Michael Howard, in a statement. He said Xpand gives the company the ability to scale up its SkySQL cloud DBMS further and address a large new base of prospective customers. Postgres is the fourth most-used database management system, according to SolidIT Consulting & Software Development gmbh’s DB-Engines ranking.

Xpand is a distributed SQL database built for resilience and scale. It’s intended to withstand infrastructure failures and remain available by storing multiple copies of data on different database nodes. The company claims Xpand delivers a 2.5-times improvement in throughput and a four-times boost in latency over the earlier release of SkySQL.

MariaDB used its OpenWorks conference (pictured) taking place in New York City this week to demonstrate how the combination of PostgreSQL and Xpand’s enabled the distributed SQL DBMS to surpass the limits of conventional primary/replica architectures and reach five times the number of users at twice the throughput compared with PostgreSQL running on its own.

MariaDB also used the conference to demonstrate a geospatial version of its DBMS based on technology it acquired last year with the purchase of CubeWerx Inc. It called MariaDB Geospatial “a developer-first, application program interface-driven solution that embraces open standard interfaces for web mapping and geospatial queries.” The product offers customers flexibility by combining vector storage in the database with raster storage in cloud object storage.

The company also said it’s extending its cloud backup service to databases running on-premises and in other cloud infrastructures with backups that can be restored to the cloud of the customer’s choice.

A technical preview of PostgreSQL with Xpand will be available in SkySQL in a few weeks. MariaDB Geospatial and Cloud Backup are both available on SkySQL as tech previews.

Photo: MariaDB/Twitter