MariaDB: good OLTP db
Updated February 18, 2020

MariaDB: good OLTP db

Anson Abraham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MariaDB

Vital db for quite a large number of our applications used internally and externally. The database is used for some management tools used by the infrastructure team. Externally it's being used for reporting to our customers as well as holding some of the metadata. MariaDB is tied into Galera which also helps out considerably for high availability.
  • Fast writes. Writes are fast, where it depends on the hardware.
  • Reads are fast. Putting into memory is easy.
  • Functions and procedures are easy to implement.
  • Paritioning is nicely implemented.
  • Bloating. Can't reduce the size of idx log file, especially when data is truncated from tables. Space is not reclaimed. Need to find way to "shrink" file.
  • Writes are dependent on hardware. If hardware isn't great, writes will be effected. If that can still be solved through software.
  • Flushing of cache data is not as fast as it should be. There can be cases of malformed data.
  • Implementing Galera. No downtime, no loss in revenue and monitoring.
  • ROI is dependent on hardware. If you spend for the hardware, your ROI might not be seen for quite awhile.
  • Not as much ease of administration as one would think. So time and effort are involved w/ the dba.
MariaDB is cheaper than Oracle Database and MSSQL server. MySQL owned by Oracle. So MariaDB has too many forks, but enough people in the community. PostgreSQL has a larger community and better administration. However, it s not like MariaDB w/ Galera. MariaDB is not good for OLAP compared to the others. Doesn't not support JSON correctly as one would think.
If you need a robust and scalable OLTP rdbms, MariaDB works. If you need an OLAP, MariaDB is not for you. Look elsewhere. If you implement Galera, then you'll have a high availability database engine. No one true master, all masterless/slaveless. If you need to use a DB for management tools like Cloudera, etc... then MariaDB works.