MariaDB secured a deal to acquire GridGain Systems, the team behind the Apache Ignite open source, distributed database platform.

The deal will see MariaDB’s relational database merge with GridGain’s in-memory power offering to create what the former describes as “sub-millisecond data infrastructure for the agentic era.”

“The rise of agentic workloads has placed unprecedented demands on enterprise infrastructure, causing requirements to explode and requiring a level of scale and sub-millisecond latency that traditional systems simply weren’t built to handle,” MariaDB CEO Rohit de Souza explained. “By uniting MariaDB’s platform with GridGain’s in-memory data grid, we are entering a new weight class. This enables us to provide a high-performance, scalable, open alternative to the rigid lock-in of Oracle and the fragmented complexity of hyperscalers.”

Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The folks behind it, though, are looking to position it as a means to offer an alternative route from the fragmentation of hyperscale services, claiming the big boys offer “separate, disconnected [data] services.”

The MariaDB-plus-GridGain offering then looks to offer a unified, hybrid-cloud platform capable of supporting myriad AI enterprise workloads.

“Enterprises today cannot afford the latency introduced by siloed data architectures. With MariaDB and GridGain, enterprise customers will get a unified platform that provides them the best of both worlds, performance and scale without having to give up on durability," GridGain CTO Lalit Ahuja added. “The combined technology stack will unlock one of the key enablers for agentic enterprises: high-performance and reliable data processing that powers the next generation of AI applications.”