Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. MariaDB Platform

Amazon Relational Database Service is a perfect fit for everyone who is seeking for an high-performance cloud-based database service. No matter if Postgres, Oracle, or any other type of relational database. Amazon RDS is our first choice for any kind of database requirement in the cloud. Especially I like the scalability.

• Applications where the users need [to] execute many short queries.
• With new storage engines such as Aria, which allows to replace MyISAM with some improvements, and XtraDB, which evolves InnoDB.
• To fuse the legacy features with the features available in NoSQL databases.
• Connection management, which allows multiplying the number of concurrent accesses.
• New clustering engines, such as Galera, which allow interesting possibilities for Cloud adoption.

Incentivized

• Automated Database Management: We use it for streamlining routine tasks like software patching and database backups.
• Scalability on Demand: we use it to handle traffic spikes, scaling both vertically and horizontally.
• Database Engine Compatibility: It works amazingly with multiple database engines used by different departments within our organization including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
• Monitoring: It covers our extensive monitoring and logging, and also has great compatibility with Amazon CloudWatch

Incentivized

• Simpler learning curve. MariaDB is a cleaner, simpler system that is (IMO) easier to learn and easier to manage effectively than many other database systems.
• Lower hardware requirements. After migrating to MariaDB from another database software system, we find that our hardware needs have substantially decreased.
• MariaDB support is very responsive. It's like they actually care. On the few occasions we've run into technical issues, support has always come through with what we needed. Once it was showing me a relatively new feature the server supported that I wasn't aware of, that, once I was able to properly make use of it helped me resolve a serious production performance issue.
• Architectural flexibility. As an example, the ready availability of synchronous (Galera) versus asynchronous replication schemes without being locked into one of the other by enormous technical complexity or punitive licensing, allows the customer to find what really works best for their needs.

Incentivized

• It is a little difficult to configure and connect to an RDS instance. The integration with ECS can be made more seamless.
• Exploring features within RDS is not very easy and intuitive. Either a human friendly documentation should be added or the User Interface be made intuitive so that people can explore and find features on their own.
• There should be tools to analyze cost and minimize it according to the usage.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We do renew our use of Amazon Relational Database Service. We don't have any problems faced with RDS in place. RDS has taken away lot of overhead of hosting database, managing the database and keeping a team just to manage database. Even the backup, security and recovery another overhead that has been taken away by RDS. So, we will keep on using RDS.

Incentivized

I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.

Incentivized

We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB support and they have always responded very quickly and have not been tutoring for the duration of the incident/problem.

Likewise, they want to hold constant meetings with the client to get their opinion as well as how they can help.

I see a very human support and concerned about the customer.

Incentivized

the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service

Incentivized

In a few words, we are just to confortable working with oracle and sql server. Using RDS add another layer of distributed database in order to backup everything we have in case of a disaster and also complies with authorities locally and internacionally. All database we use, are local in custom servers that we maintain, but we agree to expand this.

Incentivized

MariaDB stacks up the the competition just fine. Due to is ture open source nature we do not have to worry about licencing and spending money on nothing. Moreover, MariaDB does everything that we need to get done. We can run data that is a million rows or many smaller projects on the same environment with little overhead. One of the best features that MariaDB has is the ability of backup or dump data to standard text sql statements. That was one of the reasons why we choose MariaDb because it makes backups or transferring data a snap

Incentivized

• RDS is costly and thus small business should avoid it as it might not be worthful (in ROI perspective)
• Downtime is very low and there are automated backups thus we dont have to worry much about technical stuff and can focus more on marketing and sales
• Due to various automated features such as automated backup etc we dont need a huge technical team thus reducing the cost of maintaining a huge technical team ,

Incentivized

• Low CAPEX if you have a team that use open source software day by day
• Medium OPEX if you have a team that use open source software day by day
• Perfect to use in academic ambient to support researchers and students

Incentivized