MariaDB vs MySQL

  • dunc Thanks for the reply. Can I ask you a couple of more questions about your experience?

    • Why did you switch?
    • Have you noticed any performance benefits?
    • Was it a fairly painless transition or was there a learning curve?
    • Do you still use PHPMyAdmin with MariaDB or do you perform most tasks with the command line?

    I appreciate your time. I've been looking into it but prior to doing anything I like to gather info to see if it makes sense for the way I work.

  • I’ve had sites switch back and forth between the two without problems over the years. Like Drew said if your on a shared host there is a decent chance you’re already using Maria without knowing. Just last week I had to export a Maria database and then import it into MySQL with 0 issues.


    Unless you’re using triggers, stored procedures or cursors, you’re not going to see much of a difference, and even then probably not. When Maria first came out we used it for a project because the DB admin wanted us to set up some specific trigger action that wasn’t supported in MySQL at the time, i can’t remember exactly what wasn’t supported but i’m not sure that’s even an issue any more.


    Most of the time I hear people switch it’s based on a grudge held against Oracle.

  • Most of the time I hear people switch it’s based on a grudge held against Oracle.

    A grudge is kind of what it feels like to me as well. There is supposedly some performance and feature benefits as well but I have not had anyone confirm that there is a real performance boost and I don't think I really need the additional features. MariaDB has been around awhile and the thought process was there was going to be a divergence between the two making compatibility an issue but it doesn't seem like that has happened yet.


    Thanks Jordin

  • dunc Thanks for the reply. Can I ask you a couple of more questions about your experience?

    • Why did you switch?
    • Have you noticed any performance benefits?
    • Was it a fairly painless transition or was there a learning curve?
    • Do you still use PHPMyAdmin with MariaDB or do you perform most tasks with the command line?

    I appreciate your time. I've been looking into it but prior to doing anything I like to gather info to see if it makes sense for the way I work.

    Hi Matt,


    I switched because at the time I was looking to run stored procedures and views in a database and MariaDB did that better than MySQL - the switch was painless, zero learning curve.


    At the time, there was meant to also be a performance benefit and to me it 'felt' faster - but that is purely anecdotal, as I didn't run any kind of benchmarking. And of course, there's so many other places to slow things down, that the performance benefit was negligible.


    I still use PHPMyAdmin with it and it works fine. Although I do also use the command line. Which is also fine...


    All in all, no issues what-so-ever. But again, I did this a few years ago.