MariaDB Corporation announced that cloud-based Student Information System provider Campus Cloud Services has migrated to MariaDB SkySQL as its cloud database running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and SkyDBA for fractional DBAs with A+ proactive care. With dynamic scalability and a zero-tolerance policy for any downtime, SkySQL powers Campus Cloud, a cloud solution that manages all student data in one place - across admissions, academics, financial aid, accounts and billing, graduation and career placement - for over a hundred thousand students each day and growing.

For career-oriented and technical colleges back-to-school is every day of the year. "The rapid shifts in day-to-day operations forced by COVID-19 were tough on smaller, nontraditional colleges with limited IT resources and year-round demand," said Dan Knoble, CEO at Campus Cloud. "We cater to these schools and worked to help several remain open during the pandemic by giving them instant access to cloud systems that can be accessed anywhere. Having run MariaDB on our own dedicated bare metal for a long time, we migrated to the cloud with SkySQL to meet our growth and performance challenges. By going to the source for our cloud database, we are confident knowing we have access to the elite team that built the database that can help us overcome any challenge we face."

Campus Cloud is a Student Information System (SIS) that has built more than 350 APIs to communicate with most learning management systems (LMS), including Canvas, Moodle and Brightspace, and with other software popular in the higher education market. "We're embracing an open API environment to extend college services that gives our customers the flexibility to build a system that works for them," said Knoble. "The connectivity we're building and the volume of data we're moving only increase our need for a modern cloud database with high availability, scalability and security. SkySQL's roots in open source running on Google Cloud score high marks in our books."

Sasa Skoko, Campus Cloud CTO, added, "We love everything about SkySQL as we serve increasing numbers of students across the U.S. each day. MariaDB's intelligent database proxy and router is included in our SkySQL multi-node deployments at no extra cost, and, frankly, it may be one of the best practical database technologies of the early 21st century. It increases redundancy, coordinates automatic failover, and handles concurrent connections beautifully. In our testing using N2 instances, SkySQL on GCP outperformed other cloud database offerings we evaluated."

SkyDBAs: The Professors of Cloud Databases

As a lean organization that needs to focus its software engineers on feature development for its customers and offload database responsibilities, Campus Cloud benefits from SkyDBAs being a true extension of its team. Having SkyDBAs means day-to-day operational help, consultation and planning for the future with virtual DBAs who know each business's applications, data and environment.

"Our own servers became too much to take care of," said Skoko. "Our experience with SkyDBAs as we tested SkySQL and shifted our workloads there was exemplary. They have been a big help to our developers, finding a needle in a haystack and fixing a truly nasty query, for example. In the rare instances when we have a ticket, a SkyDBA is on it right away. The way they help with more theoretical questions is also unique: we've asked what's the best approach to a certain problem, and they dig in and share their expertise. It's like working with the professors of cloud databases!"

With SkySQL, customers have the freedom to go anywhere - any cloud, any workload and any scale. SkySQL delivers unmatched flexibility and massive scalability in a cloud database that keeps up with customers' changing needs, while saving 90% of their legacy database cost. SkySQL supports fast transactions and real-time analytics for cloud data warehousing, with the ability to scale elastically using Xpand, MariaDB's distributed SQL database. It is capable of scaling to millions of transactions per second with ease and is indestructible implementing world-class high availability. For additional personalization and customization, SkyDBAs deliver always-on, proactive coverage of SkySQL database operations, 365 days a year.