Azure Database for MariaDB in Preview

Microsoft has recently announced another Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering with the release of MariaDB in Preview in Azure. I’d like to tell you more about that offering and what are some of its advantages.

First, a little history on MariaDB. MariaDB is a community developed fork of the MySQL. Essentially, when Oracle purchased MySQL from Sun, some of the developers from MySQL were concerned that the acquisition would make changes or lead down the road where it would no longer be open source.

So, they went ahead and forked off to MariaDB with the intent to maintain high compatibility with MySQL. Also, the contributors are required to share their copyright with MariaDB foundation rights, which in a nutshell means they want this foundation to always be open source.

Now take the open source technology of MariaDB, which is a proven and valuable method for many companies, and compile that with the fact that it’s in the Azure platform as a managed offering, consumers using this offering from Azure get to take advantage of some of the standard capabilities in the PaaS model, such as:

• Built-in high availability with no extra cost
• 3 tiers (basic, general purpose and memory optimized) which you can choose depending on your workload, transactional or analytical processing.
• 99% availability SLAs
• Capabilities for predictable performance done by built in monitoring and alerting, allowing the ability to quickly assess the effects of scaling V-Cores up or down based on current or projected performance needs – through automation or manually in seconds.
• The secure protection of sensitive data at rest and in motion. Uses 256-bit encryption on secured disks in the Azure data centers and enforces an SSL connection for data in transit. Note: you can turn off the SSL requirement if your application doesn’t support it – I don’t recommend it, but it can be done.
• Automatic backups so you can have point-in-time restore for up to 35 days

These are all the standard advantages when you turn on in Azure Database Platform as a Service offerings, like SQL DB or Mongo DB. Azure Database for MariaDB is just another option added by Microsoft to the portfolio for databases. And a great option to check out if you use MariaDB. This is now in Preview but I’m sure it will be made generally available pretty soon.

If you have questions about MariaDB or anything Azure in general, we love anything Azure and would love to share our knowledge with you, no matter where you are in your Azure journey. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help.