MariaDB® Corporation announced that Certified Power Solutions (CPS), a leader in the engineering, manufacturing and distribution of hydraulic systems and controls, is well-equipped to safely clear snowbound winter roads by choosing MariaDB SkySQL as its cloud database running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). While summer was unbearably hot around the country, winter is coming and is expected to be brutally cold with record-breaking lows, according to Farmers’ Almanac. Powered by SkySQL, CPS’s winter road maintenance system for snowplow trucks collects data every five seconds from 5,000 vehicle sensors to better inform local agencies about their salt use for de-icing roads and keeping communities safe.
By moving away from its homegrown on-premises solution to MariaDB in the cloud with SkySQL, CPS is able to answer and resolve their customers’ needs quicker by being able to store and access data faster. Offering an improved customer experience with better uptime and reliability, CPS increased the number of users they could support by over 3,000% overnight after switching to SkySQL. CPS also saved over 60% of its total cost for databases by migrating to SkySQL.
Fleet managers of snowplowing vehicles are accountable for keeping roads safe for winter travelers. They need to control costs and, at the same time, be environmentally responsible by reducing the amount of salt applied to roadways. Salt has been used to de-ice roads for decades, in fact, more than 20 million metric tons of salt are poured on U.S. roads each winter, according to an estimate by the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies in New York.
By integrating vehicle sensors, an automated electronic spreader control system and wireless data transfer offered by CPS on their snowplowing trucks, fleet managers are able to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) telematics to build maps and reports from the data collected resulting in reduced salt used on roads. The data is automatically compiled and downloaded into the snowplowing truck’s spreader control system and then streamed to SkySQL once the snowplowing truck returns to headquarters.
“MariaDB SkySQL allows us to collect and record more data coming in from the IoT sensors on our snowplowing trucks, which lets cities, counties and state governments reduce water and salt use, saving them millions of dollars while also being more environmentally friendly,” said Jeremy Miller, R&D manager and senior principal electrical engineer at Certified Power Solutions. “We evaluated other cloud databases, including Amazon RDS, but ultimately chose MariaDB SkySQL because it gives us the flexibility to run in any cloud and not get locked into one cloud system. Plus, being a busy team, we rely on MariaDB’s expert support which is simply the best in the industry.”
MariaDB SkySQL provides all the features and functionality of MariaDB Enterprise Server as a fully managed cloud database service. Saving customers up to 90% of their legacy database costs, SkySQL takes care of everything from provisioning the cloud infrastructure to installing and deploying the database, configuring the database for production environments, and automating failover in just a few clicks. It is capable of scaling out a single database to hundreds of nodes with ease using distributed SQL and can deploy modern data warehouses for ad hoc analytics on massive data sets to meet enterprise demands.
