MariaDB Corporation, a recognized leader in open source database solutions for high availability, scalability and performance, today announced the release of MariaDB 10.1 RC, a project supervised by the MariaDB Foundation, which delivers easy-to-deploy, native database encryption without sacrificing performance and cost. By upgrading to MariaDB 10.1, MySQL and MariaDB users can fully encrypt their databases, without requiring any changes to applications, and without any overall performance degradation. Commercial databases and applications can be migrated to MariaDB 10.1 as well, enabling organizations to encrypt databases and protect their data-at-rest — at a fraction of their current total cost of ownership. MariaDB 10.1 also includes improvements in scalability, high availability, performance and interoperability.

With the consolidated total cost to respond to and remediate a single data breach averaging $3.8 million globally, and the average cost per compromised record estimated at $154, data encryption is a critical imperative.1 Data hackers have evolved, and their techniques are more sophisticated. This, combined with the exponential growth of sensitive data that companies must manage in distributed environments on premises and in the cloud, means that the cost of using perimeter security deterrents is no longer a viable option.

DBMS providers have traditionally buttressed their offerings with third-party extensions for database encryption — but their high cost, maintenance requirements, and the resulting impact on performance made them an unfeasible longer-term option for most companies. By layering native database encryption, contributed by Google, in the release of MariaDB 10.1, the company is helping to create multi-layer security protection.

“Data-centric security is paramount, but cost, performance concerns, and deployment challenges have historically served as barriers to broader adoption of data encryption,” said Garrett Bekker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Security at 451 Research. “With native, transparent data encryption in MariaDB 10.1, MariaDB helps ease adoption hurdles for CISOs and CIOs who are looking to adopt best practices in data security.”

“We are pleased to make MariaDB 10.1 available to the open source community, with data encryption capabilities contributed by Google,” said Otto Kekäläinen, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation. “With this latest release, MariaDB builds on being the most scalable and reliable open source database to now also be the most secure.”

The MariaDB 10.1 release includes enhancements in key areas: security, scalability, high availability, performance and interoperability.

  • Security advantages over other open source databases include:
    • Data-at-rest encryption: instance and table-level encryption with support for rolling keys (contributed by Google)
    • Password validation
    • Role-based access control improvements (default role) and tuning
  • High availability enhancements include a best-of-breed solution through full integration of Galera Cluster
  • Scalability enhancements include:
    • Optimistic parallel replication – all transactions will be considered to be run in parallel, giving another performance boost in master-to-slave replication
    • Slave execution of triggers when using row-based replication
    • WebScaleSQL performance enhancements
  • Performance enhancements include:
    • Query timeouts
    • InnoDB improvements such as multi-threaded flush, page compression for FusionIO/nvmfs
    • Optimizer enhancements including EXPLAIN JSON and EXPLAIN ANALYZE (with FORMAT=JSON)
  • Interoperability enhancements include:
    • CONNECT engine will have JSON/BSON support

MariaDB was recognized by Gartner on October 16, 2014, when placed in the leader’s quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems.2

Availability
MariaDB 10.1 RC is currently available to download, with general availability planned for early October.

Learn more about the MariaDB/MySQL ecosystem from Amazon, Facebook and YouTube speakers at SF-Bay-Area-MariaDB-Meet-Up. Wednesday, September 16, 2015, 6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m., Menlo Park, CA