MariaDB is an open-source relational database made by the original developers of MySQL, supported by the MariaDB Foundation and a community of developers. The community states recent additional capabilities as including clustering with Galera Cluster 4, compatibility with Oracle Database, and Temporal Data Tables, allowing one to query the data as it stood at any point in the past.
Our installation scenario is a MariaDB cluster composed of 3 nodes to achieve high availability in the service and in this way the application that accesses the backend (MariaDB) is always working and is not down at any time.
To achieve high performance of the application when accessing the database, a MariaDB MaxScale has been mounted that acts as a proxy for queries to the database.
If you have a cluster of nodes with MariaDB MaxScale and you want all the nodes of the cluster to have a similar load and not to be be penalized for queries or writes to the database, you can mount the MaxScale product in front of the MariaDB cluster. MaxScale will balance the requests based on what is being sent to each node to have an equitable load and will cache the queries that it sends to each one. This optimizes the response time to database queries and spreads the load out among all nodes in a similar way.
MariaDB does well with PHP or Python (django) in a web environment. Developers are able to work quickly.
MariaDB is extremely well documented and has a gigantic support community. If you need ask a question on how to do things you can go to many placces online and find answers quickly.
MariaDB is fast! Queries with tens of thousands of rows are quick.
MariaDB is highly compatible with Oracle's MySQL. Basically the same thing but more open and with a brighter future.
With MariaDB it is so easy to import and export data, and backups are a cinch. This saves me so much time as compared to other RDBMS.
Driver Support - Some third party applications use database drivers that cause unexplained slowness with MariaDB. This can be worked around by using the MySQL drivers, but it's not clear what causes the problem in the first place.
Support - While online communities are helpful in diagnosing problems, there isn't as much professional documentation/support available for MariaDB as some of the other major database options.
Data Visualization - It would be helpful if there were more built in options for analyzing statistics and generating reports.
MariaDB is very usable and stable to be used in production settings as an alternative to MySQL. The shortcomings of SQL are present but well understood in the community, and if the decision were to be made again, I would choose MariaDB over MySQL on future projects.
MariaDB MaxScale is a powerful tool and easy to use. It has helped us a lot to improve the performance of our database queries. It implements a security layer that acts as a firewall for the databases, masks the data, or limits the results of the queries. It also integrates easily with Kafka.
Yes, I would recommend MariaDB Platform support because they answer very fast and with detailed information. They also help you with the design of the storage infrastructure, not only with the maintenance problems. On the other hand, this service is a bit expensive.
We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB MaxScale support, and they have always responded very quickly. They also want to hold frequent meetings with the client to get their opinion understand how they can help. I see a very human support that is concerned about the customer.
It did not always compete against these technologies. Most of the time, it was complementing these databases for certain use cases to help provide a much more complete database. This makes more users want to use it to explore new solutions that help users. This is our target and how [we] work with MariaDb.
ProxySLQ allows many simultaneous connections and allows the cache of queries in memory but it does not have high availability or scalability natively, only through external tools. HAProxy is not able to perform load balancing in an optimal way.
Instead, MariaDB MaxScale allows high availability, scalability, and data replication to external systems such as Kafka. In addition, MaxScale has a monitor that allows you to see the status of the set of databases.
MariaDB has saved us enormously on licensing compared to our previous DB software vendor.
In service, it has enabled us (speaking as the internal DB team here) to provide better service to the other teams in the company as well as our customers, with less staff.
The level of hardware required for adequate performance, in our environment, has been much lower. Those savings have been substantial, above and beyond savings on licensing and DBA staffing levels.
