Financial Network, Inc. (FNI) was looking to evolve its credit strategy and loan-origination services after more than 30 years in business – but the “astronomical” fees they were paying to use Oracle Database were keeping them from it. They needed to move on, and chose MariaDB to power their growth. Let’s take a look at how (and why) they did it.
“We were doing business, we were making money, but we didn’t have money to put back into the business – to make the business thrive, to expand our marketing, to go after new customers, as well as to be competitive with other companies that fill the same little niche that FNI does. MariaDB has allowed us to do that.”
—William Wood, Director of Database Architecture, FNI
Here are five main factors that sealed FNI’s decision to escape Oracle in favor of MariaDB:
1. ROI. As the quote above shows, FNI needed significantly greater ROI from its database solution in order to grow its business. Wood explains, “When we looked at the price to migrate to MariaDB from a licensing and vendor cost standpoint, it didn’t compare. Oracle is out of the ballpark.”
2. Scalability. Oracle’s onerous $47,500-per-processor pricing model had FNI’s hands tied. Wood explains, “We couldn’t afford to upgrade hardware because going from a quad-core processor to the latest and greatest that has 96 cores … can you imagine the cost of that? Moving to MariaDB, the scalability is there.” Wood sums up MariaDB’s enterprise open source model and per-server licensing fees this way: “It’s simple. It just makes sense. It’s a good way to do business.”
3. Encryption of data at rest. “That was the clincher for us,” says Wood. Getting a similar feature from Oracle required a pricy add-on, whereas advanced enterprise security is built into MariaDB subscriptions, at no extra cost.
4. Truly supportive support. “You look at these big companies like Oracle and [IBM’s] Informix. It’s astronomical just to get that license, and then once you’re licensed, then you’re hit every year after for support,” laments Wood. “MariaDB beats them out of the water. The support is great. They’re responsive in a very timely manner. I can’t say enough good about them.”
5. Migration assistance. “You can greatly shorten your migration from any other database to MariaDB by leveraging onsite training – training from a developer standpoint, training from a database administrator standpoint – and we did that, and it helped us to be successful,” Wood explains. And now migration is even easier: shortly after FNI took its first MariaDB server live in production, a new MariaDB version debuted, introducing built-in Oracle-compatibility features.
Learn more about FNI’s journey from Oracle to MariaDB:
