Azure Database for MariaDB in Preview

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

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

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

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

• Built-in high availability with no extra cost
• 3 tiers (basic, general purpose and memory optimized) which you canchoose depending on your workload, transactional or analyticalprocessing.
• 99% availability SLAs
• Capabilities for predictable performance done by built in monitoringand alerting, allowing the ability to quickly assess the effects ofscaling V-Cores up or down based on current or projected performanceneeds – through automation or manually in seconds.
• The secure protection of sensitive data at rest and in motion. Uses256-bit encryption on secured disks in the Azure data centers andenforces an SSL connection for data in transit. Note: you can turn offthe SSL requirement if your application doesn’t support it – I don’trecommend 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 AzureDatabase Platform as a Service offerings, like SQL DB or Mongo DB. AzureDatabase for MariaDB is just another option added by Microsoft to theportfolio for databases. And a great option to check out if you useMariaDB. This is now in Preview but I’m sure it will be made generallyavailable pretty soon.