White paper
MariaDB Enterprise Platform vs. MySQL Enterprise Edition
01Introduction
MariaDB maintains a high degree of compatibility with the MySQL protocol and client interfaces, which has led to its adoption as the replacement for MySQL in several leading Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/openSUSE and OpenBSD/FreeBSD.
However, the core difference lies in their architectural approach and strategic vision. MariaDB is committed to a pluggable storage engine architecture, which is critical for supporting a wide spectrum of modern use cases. By optimizing different engines for specific workloads, MariaDB provides the flexibility required by demanding enterprise requirements. MySQL has increasingly focused on InnoDB as its primary storage engine. Additionally, MariaDB’s commitment to community participation and contributions remains central to its development, ensuring an open and adaptable path forward for organizations building mission-critical applications
Background
MariaDB and MySQL originated from the same roots, making them two of the most popular open-source relational databases used today. MariaDB was created as a fork of MySQL by its founder, Michael “Monty” Widenius, to ensure open and transparent development following Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL.
Since that pivotal split, MariaDB and MySQL have evolved into separate databases platforms with distinct architectural features and product strategies.
MariaDB’s product roadmap is continuously expanding to meet the demands of the modern data landscape. This commitment to growth is demonstrated through the rapid integration of MariaDB Cloud (fully managed DBaaS) and advanced capabilities such as MariaDB Exa for high-performance analytics, as well as native AI tools such as MariaDB AI RAG and MCP Server for accelerating agentic AI development. This continuous innovation ensures that MariaDB provides the strategic platform to consolidate disparate workloads, drive competitive advantage, and future-proof your data infrastructure.
02Software
Both MariaDB and MySQL offer enterprise editions: MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026 and MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.4 are the latest LTS releases. These enterprise offerings include software components not available to the community, backporting of stable features to older versions of the enterprise edition, and a combination of plugins and additional tools.
This white paper compares the enterprise offerings of MariaDB and MySQL, covering their complete feature sets.
Components
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Database | MariaDB Enterprise Server | MySQL Database |
| Database router/proxy | MariaDB MaxScale | MySQL Router |
| Data masking | MariaDB MaxScale | MySQL Enterprise Data Masking |
| Encryption functions | MariaDB MaxScale | MySQL Enterprise Encryption |
| Clustering | MariaDB Enterprise Cluster | MySQL Group Replication |
| Monitoring | MariaDB Enterprise Manager | MySQL Monitor |
| Kubernetes | MariaDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator | MySQL Operator for Kubernetes |
| Auditing | MariaDB Enterprise Audit | MySQL Enterprise Audit |
| HashiCorp Vault plugin | MariaDB Enterprise Server | MySQL Hashicorp Vault Keyring |
| PAM/LDAP authentication | MariaDB Enterprise Server | MySQL Enterprise Security |
| Thread pool | MariaDB Enterprise Server | MySQL Enterprise Thread Pool |
All of the components listed for MariaDB are included in the platform. MySQL requires you to purchase additional items to gain the same functionality. Additionally, MariaDB is committed to a pluggable storage engine architecture, while MySQL focuses on InnoDB as its primary storage engine. MariaDB combines multiple storage engines to support a wide range of use cases, with each engine optimized for a specific workload. Additionally, MariaDB actively encourages community participation and contributions.
MariaDB storage engines include:
- InnoDB, the default storage engine, is a general-purpose transactional storage engine and the best choice in many cases.
- MyRocks enables greater compression than InnoDB and reduces write amplification, providing flash storage with improved endurance and enhanced overall throughput. It is well-suited for write-heavy workloads.
- Aria is an enhancement of MyISAM, has a small footprint, and allows easy copying between systems, making it ideal for read-heavy environments.
- Spider uses partitioning to provide data sharding across multiple servers.
- ColumnStore uses a massively parallel, distributed data architecture and is designed for big-data scaling to process petabytes of data.
- Memory contents are stored in memory rather than on disk. It is best used for read-only caches of data from other tables or temporary work areas.
- S3 is a read-only storage engine that enables archiving MariaDB tables in Amazon S3 or any third-party public or private cloud that implements the S3 API, while still keeping them accessible for reading in MariaDB.
Newly introduced features for agentic AI and advanced analytics are also part of the MariaDB platform. These components are tightly integrated and provide a complete solution for your needs.
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03Comparison
This white paper compares MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026 and MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.4. The comparison is made across five categories: development, scalability and performance, high availability, disaster recovery and security. It highlights some of the features and capabilities they share, but focuses on their differences. After comparing features in these standard enterprise categories, the most unique features in each database are covered.
JSON
MariaDB and MySQL both support JSON and implement many of the same JSON functions. However, whereas MySQL stores JSON documents as binary objects, MariaDB stores them as strings.
Note
If MariaDB Enterprise Platform is configured to replicate from MySQL as part of a migration, statement-based replication must be used if any MySQL tables being replicated contain JSON columns.
Standard functions
MySQL supports most of the nine JSON functions defined in standard SQL (SQL:2016). MariaDB has implemented all of the standard SQL functions for JSON.
Note
SQL:2016 defines the IS JSON syntax to ensure that JSON columns contain valid JSON documents, but MariaDB and MySQL implemented JSON_VALID instead.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
JSON_ARRAY | Yes | Yes |
JSON_ARRAYAGG | Yes | Yes |
JSON_EXISTS | Yes | No |
JSON_OBJECT | Yes | Yes |
JSON_OBJECT_AGG | Yes | Yes |
JSON_QUERY | Yes | No |
JSON_TABLE | Yes | Yes |
JSON_VALUE | Yes | Yes |
Common functions
In addition to the standard SQL functions for JSON, MariaDB and MySQL both support many of the same utility functions for working with JSON documents.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
JSON_ARRAY_APPEND | JSON_LENGTH | JSON_SEARCH |
JSON_ARRAY_INSERT | JSON_MERGE | JSON_SCHEMA_VALID |
JSON_CONTAINS | JSON_MERGE_PATCH | JSON_SET |
JSON_CONTAINS_PATH | JSON_MERGE_PRESERVE | JSON_TYPE |
JSON_DEPTH | JSON_OVERLAP | JSON_UNQUOTE |
JSON_EXTRACT | JSON_QUOTE | JSON_VALID |
JSON_INSERT | JSON_REMOVE | ST_asGeo_JSON |
JSON_KEYS | JSON_REPLACE | ST_GemFromGeoJSON |
Differentiating functions
However, some functions are available in MariaDB but not in MySQL, and vice versa.
Note
MariaDB’s JSON_DETAILED function and MySQL’s JSON_PRETTY function both format JSON documents for easier reading.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
JSON_COMPACT | Yes | No |
JSON_DETAILED | Yes | JSON_PRETTY |
JSON_EQUALS | Yes | No |
JSON_LOOSE | Yes | No |
JSON_NORMALIZE | Yes | No |
JSON_PRETTY | JSON_DETAILED | Yes |
JSON_SCHEMA_VALIDATION_REPORT | Yes | No |
JSON_ARRAY_INTERSECT | Yes | No |
JSON_EXISTS | Yes | No |
JSON_FILTER_KEYS | Yes | No |
JSON_KEY_VALUE | Yes | No |
JSON_OBJECT_FILTER_KEYS | Yes | No |
JSON_OBJECT_TO_ARRAY | Yes | No |
JSON_OBJECTAGG | Yes | No |
JSON_QUERY | Yes | No |
04SQL
MariaDB and MySQL both support standard SQL, but MariaDB has implemented much more.
Schema
Regarding database objects, MariaDB offers additional table types that are unavailable in MySQL.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Sequences | Yes | No |
| Generated columns | Yes | Yes |
| Invisible columns | Yes | Yes |
| Temporal tables | Yes | No |
| Bi-temporal table | Yes | No |
| System versioned tables | Yes | No |
| Application time period tables | Yes | No |
| Views | Yes | Yes |
Indexes
MariaDB and MySQL both support standard indexes, but MySQL 8 also added support for descending, functional and invisible indexes. MariaDB Enterprise Platform supports up to 128 indexes, compared to MySQL’s limit of 62.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Descending | Yes | Yes |
| Functional | Yes | Yes |
| Invisible | No, supported by ignored indexes | Yes |
Queries
Both MariaDB and MySQL support a large portion of standard SQL. MySQL 8 made progress in catching up with MariaDB by adding common table expressions (CTEs) and window functions, as well as introducing INTERSECT and EXCEPT set operators, which were first introduced in MariaDB 10.3.
Furthermore, they both offer extended support in various areas. MariaDB 10.5 improved its support for CTEs by adding support for CYCLE, while MySQL 8 improved its support for rollups by adding GROUPING and allowing WITH ROLLUP to be used with ORDER BY.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
VALUES (table value constructors) | Yes | Yes |
UNION [ALL|DISTINCT] (set operators) | Yes | Yes |
INTERSECT [ALL|DISTINCT] (set operators) | Yes | Yes |
EXCEPT [ALL|DISTINCT] (set operators) | Yes | No |
WITH ROLLUP (rollups) | Yes | Yes |
WITH ROLLUP ORDER BY (rollups) | No | Yes |
GROUPING (rollups) | No | Yes |
OVER and WINDOW (window functions) | Yes | Yes |
LATERAL (lateral derived table) | No | Yes |
WITH [RECURSIVE] (common table expressions) | Yes | Yes |
WITH [RECURSIVE] CYCLE (common table expressions) | Yes | No |
05Aggregate Functions
MariaDB and MySQL both support many of the same out-of-the-box aggregate functions. However, MariaDB supports correlation and linear regression functions, while MySQL does not.
Standard deviation and variance
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
STD | Yes | Yes |
STDDEV | Yes | Yes |
STDDEV_POP | Yes | Yes |
STDDEV_SAMP | Yes | Yes |
VARIANCE | Yes | Yes |
VAR_POP | Yes | Yes |
VAR_SAMP | Yes | Yes |
Correlation and linear regression
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
CORR | Yes | No |
COVAR_POP | Yes | No |
COVAR_SAMP | Yes | No |
REGR_AVGX | Yes | No |
REGR_AVGY | Yes | No |
REGR_COUNT | Yes | No |
REGR_INTERCEPT | Yes | No |
REGR_R2 | Yes | No |
REGR_SLOPE | Yes | No |
REGR-SXX | Yes | No |
REGR_SXY | Yes | No |
REGR_SYY | Yes | No |
06Window Functions
MariaDB and MySQL both support many of the same out-of-the-box windows functions. However, MariaDB supports inverse distribution functions, whereas MySQL does not.
Value
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
FIRST_VALUELAG | Yes | Yes |
FIRST_VALUELEAD | Yes | Yes |
NTH_VALUE | Yes | Yes |
Ranking
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
CUME_DIST | Yes | Yes |
DENSE_RANKNTILE | Yes | Yes |
DENSE_RANKRANK | Yes | Yes |
ROW_NUMBER | Yes | Yes |
Inverse distribution
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
MEDIAN | Yes | No |
PERCENTILE_CONT | Yes | No |
PERCENTILE_DISC | Yes | No |
07Scalability and Performance
MariaDB and MySQL both support basic scalability and performance features (e.g., table partitioning and compression). However, MariaDB offers more advanced features through MaxScale (a database proxy/query router) and Spider, a transparent sharding storage engine.
MaxScale performs transparent read/write splitting and adaptive load balancing. Additionally, MaxScale can cache query results in Redis to reduce database workload and improve query performance.
Spider enables transparent sharding and/or parallel query, allowing MariaDB to utilize multiple database instances and/or multiple CPU cores per database instance to execute queries with linear scalability.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Table/row compression | Yes | Yes |
| Column compression | Yes | No |
| Log compression | Yes | Yes |
| Partitioning | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel query | Yes | No |
| Query result caching via Redis | Yes | No |
| Read/write splitting | Yes | Yes |
| Casual reads | Yes | Yes |
| Sharding | Yes | Yes |
08High Availability
MariaDB and MySQL both support replication (asynchronous and semi-synchronous), but MariaDB includes automatic failover for high availability, while the MySQL core product does not. However, both MariaDB and MySQL can provide continuous availability with multi-master clustering and dynamic query routing.
MariaDB multi-master clustering is based on a robust, mature and proven solution that has been used in production for years. MySQL introduced group replication in an earlier major release (MySQL 5.7). Still, it lacks advanced clustering features, such as full state transfer for adding new database instances, automatic rejoin for recovered database instances and streaming replication for handling large transactions.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Replication (async and semi-sync) | Yes | Yes |
| Replication with automatic failover | Yes | No |
| Multi-master clustering | Yes | Yes |
| Connection migration | Yes | Yes |
| Session restore | Yes | Yes |
| Transaction replay | Yes | Yes |
09Disaster Recovery
MariaDB and MySQL both support online backups and point-in-time restore.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Online backups | Yes | Yes |
| Full, incremental and partial backups | Yes | Yes |
| Online partial restore | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypted backups | Yes | Yes |
| Compressed backups | Yes | Yes |
| Point-in-time restore | Yes | Yes |
| Point-in-time rollback | Yes | Yes |
10Security
MariaDB and MySQL provide many of the same enterprise security features, but their implementations differ. MariaDB offers more advanced features for database and data protection. Additionally, MaxScale includes a firewall filter that delivers full control over how users query your data, without requiring manual rule writing. This reduces the chance of an access breach or faulty logic by programmatically recording and enforcing the rules.
Encryption
MariaDB and MySQL both support the same core encryption features, including Hashicorp Vault plugins for external key management.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Encrypted tables and logs | Yes | Yes |
| External key management | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypted connections | Yes | Yes |
| Reload SSL/TLS context | Yes | Yes |
Authentication
MariaDB and MySQL both support the same core authentication features.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| PAM/LDAP/Kerberos/NTLM authentication | Yes | Yes |
| User/group mapping | Yes | Yes |
| Password expiration | Yes | Yes |
| Password reuse policies | Yes | Yes |
| Password strength validation | Yes | Yes |
| Account locking | Yes | Yes |
Authorization
MariaDB and MySQL support the same core authorization features.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Roles | Yes | Yes |
| Privileges | Yes | Yes |
| Partial revokes | Yes | Yes |
| User resource limits | Yes | Yes |
Auditing
MariaDB and MySQL both support auditing, but with some differences. MariaDB can write to a file or to the syslog. MySQL can only write to a file, but supports JSON and XML, whereas MariaDB uses CSV. In addition, MySQL supports audit log compression and encryption. System versioned tables in MariaDB enable auditing of table changes by storing a history of changes and deletions.
With MariaDB, queries should not be logged for tables containing personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive PII (SPII), such as passwords, since audit log data is written in an unencrypted format. When audit data is mission-critical, it should be subject to controls, data protection, data retention and highly available storage as are used for other mission-critical data.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| File output – CSV format | Yes | No |
| File output – JSON format | No | Yes |
| File output – XML format | No | Yes |
| Syslog output | Yes | No |
| JSON filter/rule definitions | Yes | Yes |
| Custom events | Yes | Yes |
| Encryption | No | Yes |
| Compressions | No | Yes |
Database and data protection
MariaDB provides a broad range of advanced database and data protection features. This includes dynamic data masking to conceal sensitive and/or personally identifiable information in query results, as well as query throttling and query result limiting to safeguard the database against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. These features are made available in MariaDB Enterprise Platform through MaxScale.
| MariaDB Enterprise Platform | MySQL Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic data masking | Yes | Yes |
| Dynamic data obfuscation | Yes | Yes |
| Database firewall | Yes | Yes |
| Query throttling | Yes | Yes |
| Query result limiting | Yes | Yes |
11Artificial Intelligence Capabilities
MariaDB Enterprise Platform integrates vector search directly into its core database engine. This unlocks powerful new capabilities, allowing you to build sophisticated AI-driven applications using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, semantic search and recommendation engines.
By eliminating the need for separate vector databases, MariaDB Enterprise Platform streamlines your data infrastructure, allowing you to leverage the combined effect of traditional SQL operations and vector embeddings. By consolidating vector and relational data management, MariaDB Enterprise Platform simplifies development, enhances performance and reduces costs, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to harness the full potential of AI.
Regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and government, face additional limitations on data sovereignty, security, and operational stability, which make implementing AI more challenging. MariaDB AI RAG is the safest and easiest way to deploy a production-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solution, enabling powerful AI capabilities without altering core database infrastructure or compromising data sovereignty. It includes seamless text-to-SQL translation for natural language querying and semantic understanding of the database schema.
MySQL AI provides integrated, automated and secure ML and GenAI capabilities. AutoML simplifies ML processes, helping to build, train, and explain ML models without requiring data movement or additional costs. Similarly, in-database LLMs, with a built-in vector store and embedding models, enable GenAI, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at reduced infrastructure costs and without data movement.
12MySQL Unique Features
MariaDB Enterprise Platform integrates vector search directly into its core database engine. This unlocks powerful new capabilities, allowing you to build sophisticated AI-driven applications using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, semantic search and recommendation engines.
By eliminating the need for separate vector databases, MariaDB Enterprise Platform streamlines your data infrastructure, allowing you to leverage the combined effect of traditional SQL operations and vector embeddings. By consolidating vector and relational data management, MariaDB Enterprise Platform simplifies development, enhances performance and reduces costs, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to harness the full potential of AI.
Regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and government, face additional limitations on data sovereignty, security, and operational stability, which make implementing AI more challenging. MariaDB AI RAG is the safest and easiest way to deploy a production-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solution, enabling powerful AI capabilities without altering core database infrastructure or compromising data sovereignty. It includes seamless text-to-SQL translation for natural language querying and semantic understanding of the database schema.
MySQL AI provides integrated, automated and secure ML and GenAI capabilities. AutoML simplifies ML processes, helping to build, train, and explain ML models without requiring data movement or additional costs. Similarly, in-database LLMs, with a built-in vector store and embedding models, enable GenAI, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at reduced infrastructure costs and without data movement.
13MariaDB Unique Features
Advanced AI capabilities
MariaDB Enterprise Platform integrates vector search directly into its core database engine. This unlocks powerful new capabilities, allowing you to build sophisticated AI-driven applications using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, semantic search and recommendation engines.
By eliminating the need for separate vector databases, MariaDB Enterprise Platform streamlines your data infrastructure, allowing you to leverage the combined effect of traditional SQL operations and vector embeddings. By consolidating vector and relational data management, MariaDB Enterprise Platform simplifies development, enhances performance and reduces costs, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to harness the full potential of AI.
MariaDB AI RAG is an all-in-one, enterprise-ready solution that eliminates the complexity of building and deploying RAG applications. It provides everything you need to securely and efficiently connect agentic AI to data, so you can focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. It consolidates the entire workflow into a single, secure platform and is the fastest and most straightforward way to enable your existing MariaDB database with generative AI capabilities.
MariaDB MCP Server is engineered to provide a robust MCP interface specifically for MariaDB. Its primary objective is to facilitate seamless interaction between AI models and MariaDB databases, supporting both standard relational data operations and the increasingly vital vector search capabilities required for modern AI applications. Designed with AI agents in mind, it simplifies data workflows and enables more effective integration of database interactions into intelligent systems. When used in the cloud, it can start serverless databases and interact with AI Copilots via the API.
Much of MySQL’s AI capabilities are only available with HeatWave, furthering vendor lock-in and adding cost.
High-end analytics proficiency
MariaDB offers two robust solutions to break down the barriers to insight. Whether you need to run ad hoc queries on massive datasets or power the most demanding AI workloads, we provide a flexible and performant engine to meet your needs.
MariaDB Exa is a best-of-breed enterprise data warehouse solution delivered in partnership with Exasol. It is engineered for the ultimate in analytical performance, connecting mission-critical transactional data to one of the world’s fastest analytics engines for time-critical, customer-facing applications.
MariaDB ColumnStore is an open source, columnar storage engine designed to add powerful, ad hoc analytics directly to your MariaDB environment. It is ideal for consolidating workloads and enabling fast analysis for internal reporting and business intelligence on large datasets, without the complexity of a separate data warehouse.
MySQL does not offer a comparable analytic solution.
True high availability
MariaDB and MySQL can provide continuous availability with multi-master clustering and dynamic query routing. MariaDB multi-master clustering is based on a robust, mature and proven solution that has been used in production for years. MySQL introduced group replication in an earlier major release (MySQL 5.7). It lacks advanced clustering features, such as full state transfer for adding new database instances, automatic rejoin for recovered database instances and streaming replication for handling large transactions.
Oracle Database compatibility
MariaDB tables can be created using Oracle Database data types, and can execute stored procedures written in Oracle PL/SQL. Oracle Database compatibility simplifies migration to MariaDB, enabling DBAs to “lift and shift” Oracle Database tables, packages and stored procedures. In addition, MariaDB supports Oracle Database syntax for sequences.
Although Oracle owns both MySQL and Oracle Database, they are not inherently compatible, as they are not interchangeable.
NoSQL protocol support
MaxScale’s nosqlprotocol module enables MongoDB client libraries to use a MariaDB backend. The module transparently converts MongoDB commands into SQL for MariaDB and then translates MariaDB responses back into the MongoDB format. Internally, documents are stored in a table with an id column for the object id and a doc column for the document.
Temporal tables
MariaDB supports all three types of temporal tables defined in the SQL standard: system-versioned tables, application-time period tables and bitemporal tables.
With system-versioned tables, the database creates a new row whenever a row’s data is modified, maintaining a complete version history for each row. It enables DBAs and/or applications to query table data from a previous point in time. With application-time period tables, applications specify the start and end time for when a row is valid.
MySQL does not natively support temporal tables.
Federation
The MariaDB Enterprise Federation plugin can access tables in other databases through MariaDB. Unlike similar plugins for MySQL, it is not limited to remote MariaDB databases. It accesses remote databases, open source or proprietary, using standard ODBC connections.
MySQL Federation refers to the use of the FEDERATED storage engine in MySQL, which allows a local MySQL server to access tables on a remote MySQL server as if they were local tables. It does not provide access to other database types.
Columnar storage format
MariaDB ColumnStore enables MariaDB to leverage columnar storage and massively parallel processing for interactive, ad hoc analytics on massive datasets, eliminating the need for a separate data warehouse. However, MariaDB is not limited to using either storage format. MariaDB schemas can use row tables for transaction processing and columnar tables for analytics, or store data in both row and columnar formats, enabling support for applications that require smart transactions (i.e., hybrid transactional/analytical processing).
MariaDB Exa is a high-performance, multi-node massively parallel processing (MPP) columnar database option that delivers high performance, concurrency and top TPC-H benchmarks. It supports a multi-node architecture with read/writable standby nodes for stability.
MySQL does not natively offer a full-fledged columnar storage engine as a built-in option.
Shrinking InnoDB system tablespace
When MariaDB starts up, unused InnoDB tablespace can be reclaimed, reducing the file size. This is enabled by adding the :autoshrink attribute to the innodb_data_file_path system variable.
To reclaim space in MySQL after significant data deletions, you would perform a manual OPTIMIZE TABLE operation.
14MariaDB Cloud
MariaDB Cloud is a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that offers two robust architectures: provisioned for consistent performance and serverless for on-demand elastic scaling. Built on the full power of MariaDB Server, the platform delivers mission-critical resilience, integrated AI and multicloud freedom right out of the box. We handle the underlying operational complexity so you can focus on what matters most: building your next great application.
MariaDB Cloud streamlines the development of AI applications by integrating high-performance vector search and developer tooling directly into the database. This unified approach eliminates the complexity and cost of a fragmented data stack. It is designed to ensure uptime and resilience. It combines an advanced, self-healing architecture with intelligent, automated failover, enabling zero-downtime recovery, to protect your database from both small-scale failures and large-scale outages.
For applications with spiky or unpredictable traffic, MariaDB Cloud offers a serverless model that automatically scales on demand. It is the ideal architecture for production workloads, such as e-commerce and payment processing, as well as for cost-effective development and testing. Outstanding application performance starts with a database that delivers both raw speed and the ability to scale under load. MariaDB Cloud is engineered to provide both, with the high throughput and elastic scalability needed to power demanding services.
The serverless and entry-level provisioned tier both use MariaDB Community Server, while MariaDB Enterprise Server is available on the provisioned Power Tier.
15Benefits Summary
Benefits of MariaDB Enterprise Platform
- Advanced AI capabilities
- High-end analytics
- Advanced high availability options
- Oracle database compatibility
- NoSQL support
- Fully integrated database fleet monitoring
- Temporal tables
- Federation
- Sequences
- WITH [RECURSIVE] CYCLE
- Correlation and linear regression functions
- Inverse distribution functions
- Column compression
- Parallel query
- Query result caching via Redis
- Read/write splitting
- Casual reads
- Sharding
- Replication with automatic failover
- Connection migration
- Session restore
- Transaction replay
- Point in time rollback
- Dynamic data masking
- Query throttling
- Query result limiting
- Partitioning and date format enhancements
- Autoshrinking of system tablespace
Benefits of MySQL Enterprise Edition
- MySQL Document Store
- JSON schema validation
- Function, descending and invisible indexes
- Rollups with grouping and ordering
- Password reuse policies
- Partial revokes
- JSON/XML audit log formats
- Audit log encryption and compression
- Custom audit events
16Conclusion
MariaDB and MySQL originated from the same source but have evolved into distinct databases in recent years. MySQL 8 has caught up to MariaDB in several areas, but MariaDB continues to innovate and release updates at a much faster pace than MySQL. While MySQL has incrementally improved its transactional capabilities, MariaDB has expanded to support data warehousing/analytics, too.
For enterprise organizations looking to embrace open source and migrate off of proprietary databases such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM Db2, MariaDB Enterprise Platform provides the most powerful and most capable enterprise open source alternative, complete with Oracle Database compatibility, columnar storage for scalable, high-performance analytics and powerful high availability capabilities.
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