What a difference 2 years makes: MariaDB buys back SkySQL

Bringing DBaaS back on board in face off with Oracle

It's less than two years since MariaDB spun out SkySQL, but it's already unspinning the database-as-a-service outfit, which has since been marinated in AI sauce.

"Acquiring SkySQL helps accelerate plans and adds further innovation to MariaDB Cloud," MariaDB CEO Rohit de Souza said in a statement on Tuesday. Terms for the acquisition were not announced, though MariaDB had retained an equity stake in SkySQL.

MariaDB launched SkySQL in 2020, giving customers a cloud-based way to use its open source database, a venerable fork of MySQL. But by late 2023, after a rocky public debut, the company cut jobs and offloaded SkySQL and its globally distributed database back end for the DBaaS, Xpand.

The move confounded analysts, who saw momentum in the database-as-a-service market and feared that MariaDB may be hobbling its future growth. But a lot has changed since then.

The company went private again a year ago, via a private equity takeover. Then, in March this year, it said it wanted to get back into the database-as-a-service biz.

At the time, De Souza told The Register that MariaDB wanted to avoid its previous approach with SkySQL, because "the way that had been structured was almost having them compete with the cloud hyperscalers, which is crazy." Also, he added, "the product wasn't really there."

That's clearly changed, with MariaDB trilling in its Tuesday announcement that SkySQL had "significantly advanced its product offering" since being offloaded.

A big part of that advancement was down to SkySQL's introduction of a money-saving serverless mode, not to mention its addition of support for Microsoft's Azure public cloud, but its embrace of AI during its 18 months of independence surely didn't hurt.

When it announced a $6.6 million seed round in December of last year, SkySQL launched semi-autonomous "semantic agents" that customers can build to retrieve metadata and generate SQL queries off the back of natural language user queries. Keeping such functionality on-platform comes with security and compliance benefits, and SkySQL also claimed reduced hallucinations.

"By bringing SkySQL's DBaaS into the MariaDB portfolio, we are immediately addressing our customers' needs while also gaining a robust foundation to make MariaDB the default option for building GenAI applications," said MariaDB chief product officer Vikas Mathur in Tuesday's statement.

"Under new ownership and leadership, [MariaDB] noticed our impressive progress and realized that SkySQL was now essential to their cloud strategy," crowed SkySQL CEO Nithin Rao in a LinkedIn post. He and the rest of the SkySQL team will join (and in many cases rejoin) MariaDB as part of the deal.

Robin Schumacher, Senior Research Director and Analyst at Gartner, said of the spin-in: "The reacquiring of SkySQL by MariaDB provides the company with a more robust cloud story, which is needed given that Gartner is currently forecasting 82 percent of DBMS spend will be in the cloud by 2029."

Schumacher added: "MariaDB current lags behind its competitors in cloud adoption, but SkySQL's serverless platform, multi-cloud support, automation of administration tasks, and its AI feature set that includes natural language processing interfaces for MariaDB and vector support will give the company some of the table stakes functionality needed to compete in today's AI and cloud-focused market."

The veteran analyst Carl Olofson, who left IDC earlier this year to found his own outfit called DBMSGuru, told The Register he was less excited about MariaDB's second ownership of SkySQL than he was at the service's appearance five years ago. That's largely because MySQL proprietor Oracle last year launched a competing platform, Heatwave.

"Now they have to play catchup, because MySQL is a close cousin to MariaDB, so they share a community of users," Olofson opined. "The thing they’ve got going for them is a lot of people in that community don't trust Oracle, so they will take it as an option. But they did lose valuable time." ®