GridGain

GridGain is an in-memory data grid and database built on Apache Ignite, for teams that need low-latency data at cluster scale. Part of MariaDB.

GridGain holds an application's working data in the RAM of many servers at once, so reads and writes do not wait on a disk-bound store. It is built on Apache Ignite and runs as a distributed cache, an in-memory data grid or an in-memory database, depending on how a team deploys it. GridGain Systems became a part of MariaDB in March 2026, and the homepage now presents the product as MariaDB GridGain. The platform ships in two generations, GridGain 8 and GridGain 9, each in Community, Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Data is partitioned across server nodes in a balanced way, so capacity grows by adding machines. Native persistence appends every update to a write-ahead log and keeps the full dataset on disk, with memory holding the hot set. Full and incremental snapshots and point-in-time recovery cover backup and restore. Caches take expiry policies and Random-LRU eviction, SQL APIs define indexes on stored fields, and publish-subscribe messaging passes topics between nodes. Control Center is the operations console, with a cluster dashboard, an SQL explain tool, request tracing and a snapshot list. The platform suits enterprises whose applications need low-latency access to large datasets, from real-time analytics and hybrid transactional and analytical processing to high-performance computing. Teams already running open-source Apache Ignite get a commercial path, either by moving to an edition with support or by attaching their clusters to GridGain Nebula for monitoring. Buyers choose between running the software on their own infrastructure and handing cluster operations to Nebula, which provisions and runs managed clusters. Organisations running IBM z/OS have GridGain for z/OS. Most deployments start as a cache in front of a slower system of record and grow into a digital integration hub that serves several applications from one in-memory layer. Change feeds arrive through the Kafka sink connector in GridGain 9 or through Debezium change data capture, which keeps the in-memory copy current as source databases change. Analysts and reporting tools reach the same data over JDBC and ODBC, while Spring applications work with it directly. For a team whose bottleneck is the database round trip, GridGain becomes the layer that answers first.