The company released MariaDB MaxScale 2.0 with new data streaming integration with the distributed streaming platform Kafka, improved security and high availability capabilities.

A media release from the company quoted Roger Bodamer, chief product officer, as saying: "To stay competitive, enterprises need to be highly responsive to allow for changes to web applications without downtime to the application or backend infrastructure.

"MariaDB MaxScale decouples admin functionality from the database so the database and applications run at peak performance at scale. This decoupling enables businesses to iterate quickly to support the speed of innovation."

Data streaming: MaxScale 2.0 adds change data capture (CDC), which captures and streams all transactional data changes. This makes the data easily accessible to big data stores, like Hadoop, through messaging systems, like Kafka, for real-time analytics and machine learning applications.

Enterprise security: MaxScale 2.0 builds on its advanced database firewall feature to add end-to-end SSL to prevent unauthorised data access; MaxAdmin security enhancements to prevent attackers from gaining access and damaging configurations; and connection rate limitations to prevent DDoS attacks.

High availability: MaxScale’s high availability solution allows applications to be 100% operational without any single point of failure. MaxScale 2.0 adds a new feature to ensure there is no impact on read transactions when a node fails so user experience is never compromised.

The new release has been issued under what is known as the Business Source Licence; the licensing will switch to the GNU General Public Licence in 2019.

The licence terms state: "Usage of the software is free when your application uses the software with a total of less than three database server instances for production purposes."

The licensing has caused some disquiet in the open source community.