What’s New in MariaDB ColumnStore 6

MariaDB ColumnStore, which is included natively as part of MariaDB Enterprise Server, is a high-performance columnar storage engine that supports a wide variety of analytical use cases in highly scalable distributed environments.

Here are a few of the top-level highlights of the latest release, MariaDB ColumnStore 6.1:

  • Disk-Based Aggregation. Aggregations are performed in-memory by default. When an aggregation operation exceeds the memory allocated on the server for a query, the query is aborted with an error code IDB-2001. However, now with Disk-based Aggregation you can enable such queries to use disk for intermediate data when the memory needed for the aggregation exceeds the memory limit on the server. This allows such queries to complete.
  • LZ4 Compression for faster query results. We have added support for LZ4 compression, so ColumnStore 6 now supports LZ4 or Snappy compression. On average LZ4 has a slightly higher compression ratio than Snappy. While compressing our serialized payloads, on average LZ4 compressed payloads were 38.54% of the uncompressed size vs. 39.71% of the uncompressed size for Snappy. While compression speeds of LZ4 and Snappy are almost the same, LZ4 is hands down faster than Snappy for decompression and results in much faster query results. In some cases we found it to be 2x faster than Snappy.
  • Wider DECIMAL Field Type.  Beginning with ColumnStore 6.1, we have increased the length of DECIMAL field types from 18 to 38.  This additional precision allows for more accurate number storage (particularly for financial industry use).
  • Performance Improvements. The latest release includes a myriad of performance improvements which include better memory management, better comparison performance, better concurrent processing and better IN clause performance. Additionally, we have added improved optimizer statistics.

For More Details

These are just a few of the new features and enhancements in MariaDB ColumnStore 6. For more details about MariaDB ColumnStore and what is included in this release, see MariaDB ColumnStore 6.1 release notes and documentation.

MariaDB customers can download MariaDB ColumnStore 6.1 now, along with the other latest releases of MariaDB Enterprise.