Through the acquisition, MariaDB gains scalable, cloud-native geospatial capabilities and will join the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

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MariaDB revealed its acquisition of the geospatial products and services company CubeWerx (Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Database service provider MariaDB has snapped up Canada-based geospatial products and services company CubeWerx for an undisclosed sum.

Through the acquisition of the Canadian company, MariaDB gains scalable, cloud-native geospatial capabilities, which it intends to offer through MariaDB SkySQL, its fully managed cloud service.

The company, which is committed to open geospatial standards, is expecting to join the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

According to the company, applications that support geospatial data help to enable businesses to offer new products or services that are more engaging or tailored directly to end users.

MariaDB vice president and general manager for SkySQL Jags Ramnarayan said: “We’re taking a unique, developer-centric approach to delivering geospatial capabilities that no other database vendor has taken.

“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, MariaDB intends to provide geospatial in the manner that the developers use geospatial through modern, open standard APIs and work to eliminate the limitations for data volume, enabling geospatial data to grow at any scale.

CubeWerx is said to rely on MariaDB for managing the most used vector data along with intelligent caching.

CubeWerx co-founder and vice president for geospatial engineering at MariaDB Corporation Edric Keighan said: “MariaDB’s vision for how to deliver geospatial capabilities aligns perfectly with what we’ve built at CubeWerx.

“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.”

Geospatial data is relevant to different use cases such as mapping services for improving forecast accuracy, route optimization, inventory management, equity trading, and tracking climate change, and carbon emissions.