Thanks to David Thompson, V.P. of Engineering at MariaDB® Corporation, for taking me through the thinking of their recent integration with Tableau Software. 

The certified MariaDB integration with Tableau’s business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics platform brings together data management products and visualization technologies to enable businesses to use these solutions for reliable, fast, data-driven business decisions. 

“Millions of users around the world rely on MariaDB and Tableau to run and analyze business-critical application environments,” says Shane Johnson, Senior Director of Product Marketing at MariaDB Corporation. “We’re making it easier and more reliable to do this by certifying the combination of these two standard bearers in open source database and business intelligence products.”

Tableau and MariaDB certified the performance and availability of both MariaDB TX, an open-source database solution for transactional workloads, and MariaDB AX, an open-source solution for modern data analytics and data warehousing, with Tableau’s visual analytics software. In addition to confirming the capabilities delivered by MariaDB and Tableau, the certification also means that both companies will now support joint customers.

Customer demand for closer integration between Tableau and MariaDB and support for the combined solutions drove the collaboration. BI professionals are empowered to use the same tooling and interface with the same semantics and behavior whether deploying Tableau on a transactional system — MariaDB TX — or data warehousing system — MariaDB AX.

“At Tableau, we want to make it simple to visualize data across the most popular data stores,” says Todd Talkington, Director of Technology Partnerships at Tableau. “Adding MariaDB as a partner with certified technology is a logical step to support the growing number of companies who are adopting open source relational databases to replace aging, legacy systems.”

Across all industries, companies are looking for actionable insight into their data and empowering more users with the democratization of data. Using Tableau with MariaDB, operational reporting and visualization of high-performance analytics are easy and powerful. As a general purpose database, Tableau with MariaDB can be deployed to support a wide range of applications – from customer trend insights that influence new or better services to health data analysis that improves patient outcomes and controls costs.

MariaDB is the default in the majority of Linux distributions, most recently replacing MySQL in Debian. Within OpenStack cloud deployments, MariaDB was identified in a recent survey as the most-used database. With MariaDB’s widespread use across Linux distributions and availability in the world’s leading cloud providers as well as identified for its ease of use, MariaDB is quickly becoming the open source database standard for the modern enterprise.