MariaDB Review

Last updated: October 2 2024

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL. In my opinion, MariaDB is a better piece of technology. However, MySQL has a larger user base and better managed service offerings.

For example, Google Cloud Platform does not offer MariaDB through their popular Cloud SQL service and Azure will be shutting down their MariaDB service in 2025.

Pros

• It is free and open source.
• It allows you to change storage engines to fit particular use cases. For example, it has a columnstore engine that allows MariaDB to function as a decent data warehouse. This is a fantastic feature.
• The original author of MySQL is behind MariaDB, so you know there is high level technical talent maintaining the database.
• It is fast, safe, reliable, and has a vibrant community.
• It is readily available as a Docker image, through various package managers / official installers, or can be built from source.
• The docs are great.

Cons

• You cannot get MariaDB through GCP Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for MariaDB is going away.
• SQL Server’s 1st party tooling is just plain better. SSMS, SSIS, SQL Server Profiler, SSDT, SSRS, SSAS, and SQL Server Agent are all awesome.
• It doesn’t have an extension ecosystem’s like PostgreSQL’s.
• The PostGIS extension makes PostgreSQL much more popular than MariaDB for geospatial use cases.
• The ability to store data in a columnar format is great, but it isn’t a modern data warehouse that separates storage from compute.