MariaDB to Offer Geospatial Capabilities with Acquisition of CubeWerx

MariaDB announced it has acquired CubeWerx, a Canada-based geospatial solutions firm, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will enable MariaDB to add cloud-native, scalable geospatial capabilities through its fully managed cloud DBaaS, MariaDB SkySQL.

Demand for geospatial data is growing due to an explosion of use cases such as route optimization, location awareness, forecast accuracy, and inventory management. An influx of satellites, drones, and sensors are compiling large amounts of geospatial data each day. MariaDB says this presents a unique opportunity for businesses to integrate this data with their apps and services in new and novel ways for industries including manufacturing, financial services, gaming, insurance, construction, and energy.

The company also notes that geospatial application development has moved beyond traditional geospatial interfacing with databases to off-the-shelf geospatial library use and web APIs, which has advantages for ease of use and integration. With its developer-centric approach, MariaDB says it is becoming the only database company that is taking a non-database approach to geospatial.

“We’re taking a unique, developer-centric approach to delivering geospatial capabilities that no other database vendor has taken,” said Jags Ramnarayan, VP and general manager for SkySQL at MariaDB Corporation. “While other databases such as PostgreSQL and Oracle have added geospatial capabilities directly into the database, we are taking a modern cloud-native approach of managing virtually infinite amounts of geospatial data on low-cost, durable cloud storage and providing OGC standards-based REST APIs to access the data. We believe this approach will allow MariaDB to leapfrog the database world for geospatial application development.”

With the acquisition of CubeWerx, MariaDB will provide geospatial data to developers through open standard APIs. The CubeWerx platform manages data in tiers while leveraging MariaDB to manage frequently used vector data, such as geolocation data, as well as for caching bulky raster data such as satellite imagery. Due to MariaDB’s unlimited cloud storage, the company says data volume is no longer a limiting factor, allowing for scalability.

“MariaDB’s vision for how to deliver geospatial capabilities aligns perfectly with what we’ve built at CubeWerx,” said Edric Keighan, co-founder at CubeWerx and VP for geospatial engineering at MariaDB Corporation. “Our team brings significant experience in geospatial to MariaDB, having worked as the original implementers of Oracle Spatial. We’ll be able to help execute MariaDB’s vision to bring the best geospatial experience to developers and end users, reaching an even broader audience.”

MariaDB also announced it has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) following this new acquisition. The company is raising the CubeWerx membership to the technical committee member level and says it will use this alliance to advance open geospatial standards to make information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), reflecting its commitment to open standards.

“We are thrilled to welcome MariaDB to the OGC,” said Nadine Alameh, CEO of OGC. “MariaDB’s acquisition of CubeWerx demonstrates that the value of geospatial is finally being recognized as central to pretty much all applications and all decisions. It is great to see that what we have been working on as a geospatial community with leaders from CubeWerx and others is at the point of making impact at a scale never seen before.”

“We look forward to working with OGC and its members on the advancement of cloud-native geospatial standards,” said Franz Aman, CMO at MariaDB Corporation. “As an open source company, open standards fit well with our value system and we are excited to embrace the work the OCG has accomplished as our way to store, access, manage and share geospatial data. MariaDB SkySQL is our cloud platform that lets us leapfrog traditional database approaches and focus instead on providing a scalable solution for data providers to host their geospatial data and give developers an easy way to develop applications based on open standard APIs.”

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