MariaDB plc

01/16/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/16/2025 10:17

MariaDB Announces New Release of Its Enterprise Platform with Introduction of Vector Search for AI Application Development

Major release extends the variety of workloads supported with new vector search and expanded semi-structured data support, as well as a new cost-based optimizer to support complex queries and advanced tooling for seamless upgrades

MILPITAS, Calif. AND DUBLIN - January 16, 2025 - MariaDB plc today announced the general availability of MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025, the latest major release of its enterprise database solution. With this release, MariaDB customers have a single, complete database solution that supports a full range of transactional, analytical, semi-structured and now, artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The MariaDB database has been downloaded over a billion times and is used extensively across both small and large organizations across the globe for endless use cases including banking, flight operations, 5G, prescription management and the public sector. By extending the MariaDB database with native open source vector search capabilities, organizations adopting MariaDB can leverage the same database solution and skill set to advance their AI initiatives.

"MariaDB is known for its versatility, and that's a core part of our focus for MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025," said Vikas Mathur, chief product officer, MariaDB plc. "Bringing vector search natively to the database server lets customers extend the same database they're already using throughout their organization to new AI applications. We've also prioritized peace of mind for our enterprise customers with this release, adding tools to make upgrading versions a breeze."

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 includes updated versions of its core database, MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.4, its advanced database proxy, MariaDB MaxScale 25.01, and tools and support that deliver peace of mind for organizations running mission-critical applications.

New Vector Search Extends the Versatility of MariaDB

The adoption of AI and machine learning (ML) in the enterprise is rapidly increasing. A July 2024 survey from EY revealed that AI investments are set to double, but found that many companies are failing to invest in necessary infrastructure. Core infrastructure like vector databases have proved crucial for building AI-powered applications based on large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. While a growing set of vector database solutions exist, adopting a completely new vector database or plugin adds significant operational and technological complexity.

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 introduces new native vector search capabilities within the core database engine that are 100% open source. Vector search enables searching unstructured data by value and by semantics without the need to integrate multiple databases or compromising your system's reliability or security. It can also help LLMs deliver more accurate and contextually relevant results using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on enterprise data.

Using MariaDB's approach to vector search, our customers and organizations are enabled to keep their database stack simple. Leveraging their existing MariaDB database, customers eliminate the need to maintain separate vector databases. MariaDB's use of vector embedding is native and not an add-on capability, which simplifies management and allows for a seamless integration with existing SQL operations. Benchmarks of MariaDB's vector search capabilities show that it outperforms PostgreSQL's pgvector by 1.5x for queries per second (QPS) and 2x on index creation time.

MariaDB Enterprise Platform delivers versatility not found in other database solutions, with support for transactions, analytics, semi-structured data and now vector search for AI applications. In addition to vector search, this release expands JSON support with new functions that make working with JSON data more intuitive and efficient. These new functions cover everything from basic operations to advanced data manipulation.

Upgrade with the Ultimate Peace of Mind

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 adds critical features that enable enterprises to evaluate potential impacts on performance or stability with a new database version before upgrading in a production environment. Workload capture and replay, a new feature in MaxScale, allows customers to capture the workload of a production system, such as queries, sessions and transactions, and replay them in a test environment. The captured workloads can be used to verify that upgrades of the MariaDB database behave as expected and to measure the effects configuration changes may have.

Optimize for Modern Hardware

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 has a revamped optimizer in the database engine which incorporates a granular and refined cost model that takes into account state-of-the-art SSD disks and different characteristics of storage engines. Now, MariaDB's database can fully leverage the lower latency and high throughput offered by modern storage devices, automatically choosing the fastest execution plan for complex queries.

Enhancements for Enterprise DBAs

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 adds several new features for database administrators (DBAs) that make managing the database even easier, including:

  • Reduced operational downtime with a new online schema change feature that allows for a non-locking ALTER TABLE built into the server, which enables writing to a table while the ALTER TABLE is running.
  • Improved efficiency with a new optimistic ALTER TABLE for replication that greatly reduces replication lag by making ALTER TABLE operations two phased operations.
  • Enriched enterprise-class protection with new security features that enable TLS encryption by default, add more granular privileges and introduce a new plugin to prevent reuse of old passwords.
  • Enhanced partitioning management with new operations like converting partitions to tables and vice versa, and new enhancements to managing system versioning partitions, making database maintenance more flexible and efficient.

This release comes on the heels of new leadership and management announcements over the last four months, including a take-private transaction by K1 Investment Management, one of the largest investors in small-cap enterprise software companies, and new CEO Rohit de Souza, new chief product officer Vikas Mathur and new chief revenue officer Mike Mooney.

MariaDB Enterprise Platform is available to download now for all MariaDB customers.

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About MariaDB

MariaDB seeks to eliminate the constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling organizations to reinvest in what matters most - rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. Enterprises can depend on a single complete database for all their needs, that can be deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, hybrid use cases. Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Red Hat, ServiceNow and Samsung - MariaDB delivers customer value without the financial burden of legacy database providers. For more information, please visit mariadb.com.