MariaDB announces MariaDB Enterprise Server and welcomes Amazon’s Mark Porter as an advisor to the board of directors

Yesterday, at the MariaDB OpenWorks 2019, the annual user and developer conference of the database, the MariaDB Corporation team announced a new, fully open source MariaDB Enterprise Server.

The MariaDB Enterprise Server will support customers by delivering a database engineered for greater reliability and stability. It will be used as the default version for customers for on-premise or in the cloud.

Max Mether, VP of Server Product Management at MariaDB Corporation said to us in an email, "We're seeing that our enterprise customers have very different needs from the average community user. These customers are working on a completely different scale with a strong focus on stability and security. In order to be able to cater to these requirements, it is clear that we need to focus on a different solution by creating another version of MariaDB Server specifically focused on enterprise production workloads."

Features of MariaDB Enterprise Server

New enterprise-centric features

MariaDB Enterprise Server comes with features that solve specific enterprise requirements. The new features in development include enhanced MariaDB Backup, improved audit plugin, and full data-at-rest encryption of MariaDB Cluster.

Security, performance and scalability for production

MariaDB Enterprise Server is configured for secure, high-performance production environments, unlike Community Server. It provides reliable and faster backups for large databases. It provides end-to-end encryption for all data at rest in MariaDB clusters.

Stability at scale

The MariaDB Enterprise Server goes through rigorous quality assurance and testing and is pre-configured to fulfill the requirements of secure production environments.

Release Integrity

MariaDB Enterprise Server is distributed securely with a clearly established chain of custody from MariaDB to customers for ensuring that binaries cannot be tampered with.

Pat Casey, SVP of Development and Operations, ServiceNow, said to us via an email, "Thousands of the world's largest organizations depend on the Now Platform to create great experiences and unlock productivity. Better quality assurance and stability of critical enterprise features are extremely compelling. At our scale and in production with 100,000 MariaDB databases, reliability is what matters most."

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 is available with next version of MariaDB Platform in spring 2019. The team will also release GA versions of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.2 and 10.3, this spring, that will include high-end enterprise features, such as enhanced Backup.

Amazon’s Mark Porter joins MariaDB as the advisor to board of directors

The company further announced that Mark Porter, who ran the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) recently, joined MariaDB as an advisor to the board of directors. Porter is currently the CTO at Grab, a transportation and mobile payments company. He has previously served as the vice president at Oracle Corporation.

Porter said, "MariaDB's DBaaS solutions give businesses many advantages. By focusing on customer needs and using their deep database expertise, they have built optimizations, flexibility and enterprise capabilities that no one else can deliver. With MariaDB's growing popularity as an option to escape Oracle, the opportunity is extremely strong to capture large market share and delight customers. I'm both humbled and thrilled to be part of the MariaDB team as relational databases continue to run the most important companies on the internet."

According to the team at MariaDB, Mark Porter will contribute his expertise of cloud, distributed systems and database operations to help MariaDB rapidly grow its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering. He will also work in the direction of growth for SkySQL, and will further integrate new distributed technology into MariaDB Platform.

Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB Corporation, said, "Mark's guidance will be a tremendous asset in building a next-generation MariaDB cloud. Mark has a proven record of operating and scaling database services while driving rapid growth. SkySQL is designed from the ground up to offer the best MariaDB service for multi-cloud, including private cloud environments. It offers enterprise product capabilities beyond the MariaDB community server, that is used widely in public clouds, to ensure quality of service, security and features otherwise only found in proprietary legacy databases."

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