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.
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Neo4j
Score 9.8 out of 10
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Neo4j is an open source embeddable graph database developed by Neo Technologies based in San Mateo, California with an office in Sweden.
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.
Its very well suited for storing graph types relationship information, such as a group of people and their relationships. Data modeling this sort of information in a traditional SQL database is a pain and inefficient. Using Neo4J allows for efficient modeling of data while providing rich querying capabilities using Cypher. Its also a great fit for any programming language because of its support for REST API. It's less appropriate for any other data structure other than Graph data. So as with any DB, evaluate the data structure and query and if the querying revolves around relationships, then Neo4J is a fit. If there is more need for looking up individual nodes and their associated information, Neo4J might not be the most efficient solution in the market.
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.
It would be nice to have some concept of namespaces, or some way of roughly making a single instance multi-tenant. It'd be nice to make sandboxing easier.
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.
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.
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.
I have not used anything like Neo4J because of how unique it is in the work that it allows me to do. I am not aware of any other graph database platforms and it might be because it is a growing area (especially in the world of pharmaceuticals). I would be open to trying other softwares though.
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.
For experimentation purposes, it had a positive impact on my company. It was very natural to work with Neo4j and so intuitive to visualize the data.
Neo4j community edition is free, which is what we experimented on. So there was no investment up front apart from employee's time. But this quickly gave results and it was time well spent.
Neo4j is a cool but very new technology. It was hard to have people onboard, especially some of the leadership and relational folks.
