MariaDB ColumnStore on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

MariaDB ColumnStore on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

MariaDB ColumnStore is a columnar storage engine for MariaDB. It stores each column separately and scans columns in parallel, so an aggregate over a large fact table reads a fraction of the data a row store would — while the interface stays plain SQL. Nothing new to learn: any client, driver or BI tool that already speaks MariaDB speaks ColumnStore, and you opt into columnar storage per table with `ENGINE=ColumnStore`.

ColumnStore is an engine, not a server. This image therefore ships MariaDB Server 11.8 LTS together with the vendor-built ColumnStore 25.10 plugin from MariaDB's own repository, which hard-depends on the exact matching server version — so engine and server can never drift apart, and neither is compiled from source. Columnar and row-based tables coexist in the same database: InnoDB for the small dimension tables you update constantly, ColumnStore for the large fact tables you aggregate over.

Why choose cloudimg?

• 24/7 expert support with a guaranteed 24 hour response for all requests. Contact support@cloudimg.co.uk
• Vendor-paired engine and server installed from MariaDB's official APT repository, never built from source against a mismatched ABI
• Per VM credentials generated on first boot and written to a root-only file. No password exists in the published image and no two machines share one
• Closed by default — MariaDB listens on loopback, and the engine's internal services are closed to off-host traffic by a host firewall
• Production ready from launch — OS security baseline applied and the engine verified end to end before publication
• Azure native — Azure Linux Agent, cloud-init and Gen2 Hyper-V

What is included

• MariaDB Server 11.8 LTS and the ColumnStore 25.10 columnar storage engine
• The full engine stack: PrimProc, ExeMgr, controllernode, workernode, DMLProc, DDLProc and WriteEngineServer
• ColumnStore SQL extensions and UDFs, verified present before capture
• `cpimport` bulk loader for high-throughput ingest
• `mariadb`, `mariadb-admin` and `mariadb-dump` clients
• An empty working database and a scoped application account, ready for your schema
• A first-boot service that generates this machine's credentials before the database is allowed to start
• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with security patches applied at build time

Use cases

• Analytical and reporting queries over large fact tables where a row store has become the bottleneck
• Data warehousing and data marts that need column-oriented performance without leaving SQL
• Business intelligence back ends — anything speaking the MySQL wire protocol connects unchanged
• Mixed workloads keeping transactional row tables and analytical columnar tables in one database

Technical specifications

• Operating system: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)
• MariaDB Server: 11.8 LTS · ColumnStore engine: 25.10
• SQL port: 3306, bound to 127.0.0.1. Remote access via SSH tunnel; no database port need be opened
• Administrative and application passwords: generated per VM at first boot
• Service management: systemd
• VM generation: Hyper-V Gen2 with UEFI boot

Sizing. ColumnStore's appetite for RAM and cores scales with your data, not with the software. The image is frugal and starts on small sizes; MariaDB documents 8 cores with 32 GB for development work and considerably more for production. Size to your working set — the deployment guide covers the memory settings to raise as you grow.

Licensing. ColumnStore and MariaDB Server are open source (GPL-2.0). There is no licence fee. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 support.

Support

cloudimg provides 24/7/365 expert technical support. Contact support@cloudimg.co.uk. Deployment guide: https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/mariadb-columnstore-on-ubuntu-24-04-azure/