Item: MariaDB Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MariaDB

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team is currently using MariaDB Enterprise to store data for several customer-facing microservices that delivery critical weather data in the form of alerts and reports. To the best of my knowledge we are the only team in our division that uses it. Previously we were using a NoSQL implementation but it was not a good fit for the types of data we store. Moving to a relational model has made a huge improvement in performance and reliability. We specifically chose MariaDB as it supports a multi-region replication model.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Replication - Works extremely well and has very reasonable latency.
Monitoring - There is no shortage of tools for monitoring clusters.
Reliability - Rock-solid product that appears to be quite resilient.

Cons

I honestly can't think of anything I'd change.

Return on Investment

Very positive. We were able to reduce our infrastructure costs by ~50%.
Microservice performance and capacity has also increased giving us much more headroom and value per-server.

Alternatives Considered

Cassandra and PostgreSQL

We were already wanting to migrate away from Cassandra for reasons of stability, cost (more servers were needed), and our data storage model. We evaluated PostgreSQL but passed on it due to being more familiar with MariaDB. Also we needed something that could do multi-region replication and doing that with PostgreSQL was much more complicated.

Support Rating

Having opened several support tickets with MariaDB Enterprise support I have been consistently pleased with their knowledge and responsiveness. Tickets were updated in a timely manner and every problem was found to have a solution. They were also able to offer useful feedback during our architecture and planning phases. They have been invaluable partners so far and we have no reason to think that will change moving forward.

Other Software Used

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Datadog

Likelihood to Recommend

Given that MariaDB is a relational database, it is best suited for situations where data integrity is a necessity and said data is highly structured. It is a little more difficult to scale so having a consistent load is also a plus since you can plan for capacity more easily.

If being able to scale easily and dynamically is import then MariaDB might not be a good fit. Also if data consistency is less important than speed or flexibility then there are other database models (document, key-value store, etc.) that may be a better fit.

Comments

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MariaDB Enterprise - Washing the taste of NoSQL out of my mouth!