This week in infrastructure

This article discusses the integration of DuckDB as a storage engine in MariaDB, specifically for analytics purposes. MariaDB already has a columnar analytics engine called ColumnStore, but the addition of DuckDB provides an alternative analytics engine. The integration is currently available only for MariaDB 11.4, an older version, and is based on AliSQL, a fork of MySQL by Alibaba Group that integrates DuckDB and vector indexes. The article notes that MariaDB developers prefer initial integration in older versions before forward-porting to newer releases like MariaDB 12.3 LTS and 13.0. The content is behind a paywall for subscribers.