News

MariaDB Reactive Relational Database Connectivity Connector Goes GA

• By John K. Waters
• January 7, 2021

The MariaDB Corp., the company behind MariaDB, community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), today announced the general availability of the MariaDB Reactive Relational Database Connectivity (R2DBC) connector.

The new connector implements the most recent R2DBC 0.8.3 specification to provide a non-blocking, fully-reactive API used to communicate with relational sources.

"The JDBC API, made available through MariaDB Connector/J, has long been a popular choice among Java developers for creating applications that connect to and communicate with MariaDB," said Rob Hedgpeth, director of developer relations at MariaDB, in a blog post.
"However, with the introduction of MariaDB's new R2DBC driver, developers now have the ability to interact with MariaDB databases completely non-blocked through the use of asynchronous data streams."

R2DBC is an emerging standard in the Java world. It enables applications to benefit from reactive programming by using a stream-oriented approach to interact with relational databases. Unlike its JDBC predecessor, the R2DBC enables applications to take advantage of declarative programming techniques to create more powerful, efficient and scalable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) solutions, the company explained in a statement.

"MariaDB is one of the most popular relational databases used in the world, and we couldn't be more excited for the MariaDB Connector to be added to the R2DBC ecosystem," said Mark Paluch, spec lead of the R2DBC specification. "Reactive, or non-blocking behavior through the use of asynchronous data streams can be extremely useful for improved efficiency of resource usage and for increased throughput. Beyond that, reactive programming enables a variety of real-time streaming use cases. Being able to realize these benefits using popular relational databases such as MariaDB is a game changer."

The company also unveiled a new Developer Hub created to help developers build modern applications. The hub is "a treasure trove of materials for modern application development," said Hedgpeth in a statement.

"The new Developer Hub makes it easy to learn about MariaDB Connectors and features such as analytics for cloud data warehousing, JSON for hybrid data modeling, and hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) for real-time smart transactions," he said. "Plus, learn how to use each feature using sample applications and step-by-step guides."

The MariaDB Connector/R2DBC is available for download now on our MariaDB downloads page and is available through the Maven repository. The MariaDB Connector is also compatible with client libraries such as Spring Data R2DBC. To dive in deeper, join our upcoming webinar on Creating Fully Reactive Applications with R2DBC and MariaDB.