 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for wall-to-wall coverage. It is re-invent 2020, our 10th year with theCUBE. Dave and I started this journey 10 years ago here at re-invent, been there two sets here, a set upstairs, great content. I'm here with Paul Gillin, my co-host. Paul's out reporting on the floor doing some interviews. Paul, what do you think so far? It's a pretty crazy activity going on here. Well, the activity hasn't declined at all. I mean, here we are in day three of the show and it's just as busy out there as it was on day one. And there's just an energy here that you can feel. It's palpable. There is a lot of activity around developers, a lot around data, which actually brings us a good segue into our next guest because one of the leaders in data management in the cloud is MariaDB. And John is the CRO at John Backies, the CRO at MariaDB and here to talk to us about your cloud version and how open source is going for you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us. So here's the update on the product. What do you guys do in the relation to AWS? How's that going? Give us a quick update. In the relational database? No, no, the relationship with AWS and SkySQL, what's the update? There's no relationship that we have that's more important than the AWS relationship. We're building our cloud, our premier cloud service called SkySQL on AWS. They offer the best, world best in class infrastructure for a SaaS company to build what they're building. And for us, it's a database service. And then beyond that, they help you from the business side. They try to get you lined up in the marketplace and make it possible for you to work best with customers. And then from a customer perspective, they're super helpful in not only finding perspective customers, but making that customer successful because everybody's got a vested interest in the outcome. Yeah, a little tongue twister there. Relational database relationship. We've got relational databases, got unstructured. Data is at the center of the value properties in Swamy's keynote today and the Adam CEO's keynote. Data and security dominated the keynotes and the conversation. So customers are really wanting to accelerate the developer experience, developer pipelining, more code faster, more horsepower under the hood, but this data conversation, it just never goes away. The world's keeping up around. It never goes away. I've been in this business for almost 30 years and we're still talking about the same key factors, right? Reliability, availability, performance, security, these things are pervasive in the data management because it's such a critical aspect to success. And in this case of SkySQL, you have both a transactional and an analytical engine in one. That's correct, right? And that was a, what has the customer adoption been like of that hybrid or I guess it's not a hybrid, but a dual adoption? So the thing that makes that important is that instead of having siloed services, you have integrated data services. And a lot of times when you ask a question that's analytical, it might depend on a transaction. And so that makes the entire experience best for the developer, right? So to take that further, we also in SkySQL offer a geospatial offering that integrates with all of that. And then we even take it further than that to distribute a database with expand or ADB expand. A lot of discussion, geospatial announcement today on stage, just a diversity of data and your experience in the industry, there's not the one database that rule them all anymore. There's a lot of databases out there. How are customers dealing with, I won't say database sprawl because you need databases. You got real time transactional, you got batch going on, you got streaming data. All kinds of data use cases now, all kind of having to be rolled together. What's your reaction and what's your take on the state of data databases? So when I started in this business, there were four databases and now there's 400 databases. And the best databases really facilitate great application development. So having as many of those services in real time or in analytics as possible means that you're a database for everyone or for all users, right? And customers don't want to use multiple databases. Sometimes they feel like they're forced to do that. But if you're like MariaDB, then you offer all of those capabilities in an integrated way that makes the developer move faster. Amazon made a number of announcements this morning about in the data management area, including geospatial support on RDB, RDS I believe. How do you, I guess, coordinate yourself? Your sales message with their sales message, given that you are partners, but they are competing with you in some ways. Yeah, there's always some cooperation, I guess, that happens with AWS in the various product silos that they're offering their customers. For us, we're one of thousands of obviously partners that they have, and we're out there trying to do what our customers want, which is to have those services integrated, not glued together with a variety of different integration software. We want it integrated in the service so that it's one data provision, data capability for the application developer. It makes for a better experience for the developer in the end. On the customer side, what's the big activity? I mean, you've got the on-premises database, get the cloud. When should a customer decide, or what's the signals to them, that they should either move to the cloud or change, be distributed? What are some of the forcing functions? What's the market like? Yeah, I've come a long way on this, but my opinion is that every customer should be in the cloud. And the reason simply is the economies that are involved, the pace of execution, the resilience and dependability of the cloud, Amazon being the leader in that space. So if you were to ask me, right now is the time to be in SkySQL because it's the premier data service in the cloud. So I would take my customer out of their on-prem and put them all in AWS on SkySQL if I could. Not everybody's ready for that, but my opinion is that the security is there, the reliability, the privacy, all of the things that maybe are legacy concerns. It's all been proven to be adequate and probably even better because of all of the economies of scale that you get out of being in the cloud just generally. Now, MariaDB started on-premise though, and you still have a significant customer base on-premise. What, if anything, are you doing to encourage them to migrate to the cloud? Well, so we have hundreds and hundreds of customers as MariaDB and we weren't the first database company to put their database in the cloud, but watching it unfold helped us realize that we're going to put MariaDB in its best form factor in SkySQL. It's the only place you can get the enterprise version of MariaDB in a cloud service, right? So when we look at our customers on-prem, we're constantly telling them, obviously, that we have a cloud service. When they subscribe, we show them the efficiencies in the economies, and we do get customers that are moving. We have a customer, O2, Telefonico over in the UK that moved from an on-premise to manage their Wi-Fi services across Europe, and they're very happy. They were one of our very first SkySQL customers, and that has routinely proven itself to be a path towards not only a better operation for the customer, they're up more, they have fewer outages because they're not inflicting their own self-wounds that they have in their own data center. They're running on world-class infrastructure on a world-class database. What are some of those self-wounds? Is it personnel, kind of manual mistakes, just outages, reliability? What's the real cause, and then what's the benefit alternative in the cloud that we're so excited about? I mean, I think when you repeat the same database implementation over and over on the infrastructure, it gets tested thousands and thousands of times. Whereas if I'm a database team and I install it once, I've tested it one time, and I can't account for all of the things that might happen in the future. So the benefit of the cloud is that you just get that repeat ability that happens, and all of the kinks and bugs and issues are worked out of the system, and that's why it's just fundamentally better. We get 99.999% uptime because all of those mistakes have been made, solved, and fixed. Fully managed, obviously. Huge benefit, and people are moving, it's just great benefit, so I'm a fan, obviously. I think it's a great way to go. I got to ask about the security, though, because big conversation here is security. What's the security posture? What's the security story to customers with SkySQL and MariaDB? Right, right, right. So we've taken the server, which was the initial product that MariaDB was founded upon, right? And we've come a long way over the several years that we've been in business. In SkySQL we have SOC2 compliance, for example. So we've gone through commercial certifications to make sure that customers can depend on that we're following processes. We have technology in place in order to secure and protect their data. And in that environment, it is repeatable. So every time a customer uses our Dbass infrastructure, the database is a service infrastructure called SkySQL, they're benefiting from all of the testing that's been done. They go that and do that themselves, they would have to go through months and months of processes in order to reach the same level of protection. Now, MariaDB is distributed by design. Is that right? Yeah, so we have a distributed database. It's called Expand, MariaDB Expand. And it's an option inside of SkySQL. It's the same cost as MariaDB server. But Expand is distributed. And the easiest way to understand what distributed databases is to understand what it is not first. What it is not is like every other cloud database. So most of the databases strangely in the cloud are not distributed databases. They have one single database node in a cluster that is where all of the changes in rights happen. And that creates a bottleneck in the database. And that's why there's difficulties in scale. AWS actually talked about this in the keynote, which is the difficulty around multi-writer in the cloud. And that's what Expand does. And it spreads out the reads and the writes to make it scalable, more performant, and more resilient. One node goes down, still stays up, but you get the benefit of the consistency and the parallelization that happens in Expand. So when would a customer choose Expand versus SkySQL? So we have, I would say a lot of times, but the profile of our customers are typically like financial services, trade stores. We have Samsung cloud, 500,000 transactions per second in an Expand cluster where they run sort of their Samsung cloud for their mobile device unit. We have many customers like that where it's a commercial-facing website often or a service where the brand depends on uptime. So if you're in exchange or if you're a mobile device company or an IoT company, you need those databases to be working all the time and scale broadly and have high performance. So you have resiliency build-in essentially, yeah. And that's the major benefit of it. It hasn't been solved by anybody other than us in the cloud, to be quite honest with you. It's a differentiator for sure. It is, a huge differentiator. And there are a lot of interested parties. We're going to see that be the next discussion, probably next year when we come back. Whereas what's the state of distributed database because it's really become really the tip of the spear with the database industry right now. And what's the benefit to that? Just quickly describe why that's important. Obviously the performance and the resilience are the two we just talked about, but also the efficiency. So if you have a multi-node cluster of a single master database, that gets replicated four times, five times over. Five times the cost. And so we're taking cost out, adding performance in. And so you're really seeing a revolution there because you're getting a lot more for a lot less. And whenever you do that, you win the game, right? Awesome, yeah, that's true. And it seems like, okay, this might be more costly, but you're not replicating. That's right. That's the key. Replicating just enough to be resilient, but not excessively to be overly redundant. I find that the conversation this year is starting to unpack some of these cloud native embedded capabilities inside AWS. So are you guys doing more on the customer side around marketplace? Are you guys, how do people consume products? It's really both. So sometimes they come to us from AWS. AWS might say, you know what? We don't really have an answer. And that's specifically true on the expand side. They don't really have that in their list of databases yet, right? Hopefully we'll get out in front of them, but they oftentimes come through our front door where they're a MariaDB customer already, right? There's over 100,000 production systems with MariaDB in the world and hundreds of thousands of users of the database. So they know our brand, not quite as well as AWS, but they know our brand. If you're a loyal customer base. We do, right? I mean, people love MariaDB. They just think it's one of the, you know, it's the database that they use for application development all the time. And when they see us release an offering like expand just a few years ago, they're interested. They want to use that. They want to see, you know, how that works. And then when they take it into production and it works as advertised, of course, success happens, right? Well, great stuff, John. Great to have you on theCUBE, Paul. I guess time would do the Insta challenge here. New format on theCUBE. We usually say at the end, summarize what's most important story for you or show what's the bumper sticker. We're going to put it around more of an Instagram reel. Okay. What's your sizzle reel? What's your thought leadership statement? 30 seconds, John. So I, the thought leadership is really in scaling the cloud to the next generation. We believe MariaDB's expand product will be the technology that fronts the next wave of database solutions in the cloud and AWS has become instrumental in helping us do that with their infrastructure and all the help that they give us. I think at the end of the day, when expand, the story on expand is written, it's going to be a very fun ride over the next few years. I'm really excited. John, big CRO. Chief Revvidoff from MariaDB. Great to have you on. Thank you. 34 year veteran or so in databases. You're putting a lot of age on me. I'm 29. I'm at 29 again. I just graduated high school. I've been doing this for 10 years. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillan here, live on the floor, wall to wall coverage. We're already into like 70 videos already. Got a whole another day to finish out. Day three, keep watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.