MariaDB is a binary dropin replacement for MySQL. So goes the old marketing message. That is all fine, but what has changed for you who work with database development and administration? There are some very crucial high level differences that come into play. Whether you are into datawarehousing or low latency solutions, MariaDB has something to offer. But you want to think twice before running a mixed environment with MariaDB and MySQL..
The Replication Matrix
MariaDB.com has a replication compatibility matrix that shows compatibility issues that you have to consider if you are planning on running both MariaDB and MySQL in the enterprise. You might find that using MariaDB as a master and MySQL as a slave in asynchronous replication setups is a challenge. Check out the matrix.
If you want to transition to MariaDB and do it the simple way, you want to design a large scale migration of all your MySQL servers. You also want to be aware of the Group Commit feature for the binary log. The purpose is to make sure that after a server crash, any transactions that were reported as committed before the crash will remain in the database after disaster recovery. Without the Group Commit feature, you can run into the situation where transactions in the binary log are missing. This will effectively break migration for slave servers in the storage engines InnoDB and XtraDB.
Storage engines and more in-depth logging
MariaDB added more than twice the number of storage engines to this list. A few of these stand out as they cater to special needs such as data warehousing and low latency data transfer speeds:
- ColumnStore is a column oriented storage engine that can help you store petabytes of data.
- Aria is a MyISAM replacement that has improved caching. Well worth looking into for thoes with high data transfer speed requirements.
- MyRocks is a storage engine that adds high compression and is especially designed for Flash storage. So if you need really fast data transfer speeds, this is worth looking into. Read more about Log-structured merge-tree data structures (LSM)
If you want an older overview of the differences between MariaDB and MySQL, Admin-Magazine.com has an interesting read.