MariaDB is a split of the MySQL relational database management system. The original developers of MySQL created MariaDB after apprehensions raised by Oracle’s achievement of MySQL. It offers support for both small data processing tasks and enterprise needs. It aims to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL requiring only a simple uninstall of MySQL and an install of MariaDB. MariaDB offers the same features of MySQL and much more. Built by the luminaries behind MySQL, MariaDB solutions power both transactional and analytics use-cases, providing enterprises a single, integrated data platform. Covering the range of high speed to big-data use-cases, MariaDB now has over 12 million users globally and 500 Enterprise customers in 37 countries. 

Impact

Open-source impact

As the world’s fastest growing database, MariaDB is also open-source at it’s core. Millions of startups and entrepreneurs are able to develop MVP’s and POC’s, and use MariaDB as the foundation of their database backed applications. With thousands of community contributors, and backed by the MariaDB corporation, we’re able to develop the best open-source enterprise database in the world.Leading the BSL movement

MariaDB is at the cutting edge of leading the Business-Source-Licensing model.As scale-ups grow and require more enterprise features and support, MariaDB is able to push the model of sustainable open-source development with the BSL model, securing a long-tail of continued development and support on our core products and services.

Innovating the database

Thanks to our Open-source and BSL model, we’ve been able to lead the way in database features, including security, privacy, redundancy, high availability, and scalability in a wide-application database. MariaDB continues to develop new features for businesses faster than any other database in the world, meaning we can serve the widest range of needs for developers and businesses that power their critical applications.

MariaDB Server MariaDB Server is the fastest growing open source relational database that builds a bridge between the old and the new. Its modern and extensible architecture provides the foundation for businesses to continuously innovate with new applications and modernize legacy database systems. Combining familiar SQL interfaces with open extensibility, MariaDB supports innovation by combining a secure relational database with new functionalities like JSON support, dynamic columns and temporal processing to cover a breadth of use cases.

MariaDB MaxScale MariaDB MaxScale is a next-generation database proxy that sits between applications and databases. This allows multiple administrative database processes like security, load balancing and streaming to run without reducing performance, which is essential in the mission-critical applications. MaxScale also prevents external attacks with its advanced database firewall features, balances the load with its dynamic SQL-aware query router, and minimizes downtime with automatic failover. In addition, it can stream transactional data for real time analytics using messaging systems like Kafka.

MariaDB ColumnStore MariaDB ColumnStore provides a powerful open source analytics solution. It leverages a pluggable storage engine to handle analytic workloads while keeping the same ANSI SQL interface that is used across the MariaDB portfolio. With massive parallel processing (MPP) architecture, MariaDB ColumnStore runs queries in parallel across all nodes. For complex analytics, MariaDB ColumnStore supports queries like complex joins, aggregation, window functions and user defined functions.

MARIADB SERVICES AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

World-Class Support and Services MariaDB is consistently given the highest rankings for its support and services. Because MariaDB support engineers are experienced as DBAs and developers, the first-line support personnel are the experts in solving the most complex database issues on the first call. Most inquiries are solved within the first touch point. Beyond support, remote DBA, consulting, training, access to a technical account manager, resident enterprise architect and migration expertise are services that help customers get the greatest performance and ROI from a MariaDB database deployment.

MariaDB Subscriptions MariaDB offers an Enterprise Subscription to provide access and support for features such as a database proxy, management and monitoring tools, notification services for security alerts and bug fixes, technical and consultative support which includes 24×7 support coverage as well as performance tuning, best practice commendations and code review.

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MariaDB is one of the most popular database servers in the world. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. Notable users include Wikipedia, WordPress.com and Google.

MariaDB turns data into structured information in a wide array of applications, ranging from banking to websites. It is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL. MariaDB is used because it is fast, scalable and robust, with a rich ecosystem of storage engines, plugins and many other tools make it very versatile for a wide variety of use cases.

MariaDB is developed as open source software and as a relational database it provides an SQL interface for accessing data. The latest versions of MariaDB also include GIS and JSON features.

MariaDB is owned by MariaDB (https://mariadb.com/) and they own all related trademarks and IP rights for this software.

Cognosys provides hardened images of MariaDB Web Edition on all public cloud i.e.  Azure.

Secured MariaDB on Ubuntu 16-04 LTS

1) MariaDB development is more open and vibrant

Disparate many other open source projects Oracle congenital from the Sun acquisition, Oracle does certainly still develop MySQL and to our knowledge they have even hired new competent developers after most of the original developers resigned. The next major release MySQL 5.7 will have significant improvement over MySQL 5.6. MariaDB on the other hand is developed fully in the open: all development decisions can be reviewed and debated on a public mailing list of in the public bug tracker. Contributing to MariaDB with patches is easy and patch flow is transparent in the fully public and up-to-date code repository. The Github statistics for MySQL 5.7 show 24 contributors while the equivalent figure for MariaDB 10.1 is 44 contributors. But it is not just a question of code contributors – in our experience MariaDB seems more active also in documentation efforts, distribution packaging and other related things that are needed in day-to-day database administration.Because of the big momentum MySQL has had, there is still a lot of community around it but there is a clear trend that most new activities in the open source world revolve around MariaDB.As Linux distributions play a major role in software delivery, testing and quality assurance, the fact that the both RHEL 7 and SLES 12 ship with MariaDB instead of MySQL increases the likelihood that MariaDB is going to be better maintained both upstream and downstream in years to come.

2) Quicker and more transparent security releases

Oracle only has a policy to make security releases (and related announcements) every three months for all of their products. MySQL however has a new release every two months. Sometimes this leads situations where security upgrades and security information are not synced. Also the MySQL release notes do not list all the CVE identifiers the releases fix. Many have complained that the actual security announcements are very vague and do not identify the actual issues or the commits that fixed them, which makes it impossible to do backporting and patch management for those administrators that cannot always simply upgrade to the latest Oracle MySQL release. MariaDB however follows good industry standards by releasing security announcements and upgrades at the same time and handling the pre-secrecy and post-transparency in a proper way. MariaDB release notes also list the CVE identifiers pedantically and they even seem to update the release notes afterwards if new CVE identifiers are created about issues that MariaDB has already released fixes for.

3) More cutting-edge features

MySQL 5.7 is looking promising and it has some cool new features like GIS support. However, MariaDB has had much more new features in recent years and they are released earlier, and in most cases, those features seem to go through a more extensive review before release. For example, GIS features were introduced already in the 5.3 series of MariaDB, which makes storing coordinates and querying location data easy. Dynamic column support (MariaDB only) is interesting because it allows for NoSQL type functionality, and thus one single database interface can provide both SQL and” not only SQL” for diverse software project needs.

4) More storage engines

MariaDB in particular excels as the amount of storage engines and other plugins it ships with: Connect and Cassandra storage engines for NoSQL backends or rolling migrations from legacy databases, Spider for sharding, TokuDB with fractal indexes etc. These plugins are available for MySQL as well via 3rd parties, but in MariaDB they are part of the official release, which guarantees that the plugins are well integrated and easy to use.

5) Better performance

MariaDB claims it has a much-improved query optimizer and many other performance related improvements. Certain benchmarks show that MariaDB is radically faster than MySQL. Benchmarks don’t however always directly translate to real life situation ,server backends, where every millisecond counts. Faster is always better, even if it is just a bit faster.

6) Galera active-active master clustering

Galera is a new kind of clustering engine which, unlike traditional MySQL master-slave replication, provides master-master replication and thus enables a new kind of scalability architecture for MySQL/MariaDB. Despite that Galera development already started in 2007, it has never been a part of the official Oracle MySQL version while both Percona and MariaDB flavors have shipped a Galera based cluster version for years.Galera support will be even better in MariaDB 10.1, as it will be included in the main version (and not anymore in a separate cluster version) and enabling Galera clustering is just a matter of activating the correct configuration parameters in any MariaDB server installation.

7) Oracle stewardship is uncertain

Many people have expressed distrust in Oracle’s true motivations and interest in keeping MySQL alive. As explained in point 1, Oracle wasn’t initially allowed to acquire Sun Microsystems, which owned MySQL, due to the EU competition legislation. MySQL was the biggest competitor to Oracle’s original database. The European Commission however approved the deal after Oracle published an official promise to keep MySQL alive and competitive. Some may argue that in recent years, Oracle has already weakened MySQL in subtle ways. Maybe, but in Oracle’s defense, it should be noted that MySQL activities have been much more successful than for example OpenOffice or Hudson, which both very quickly forked into LibreOffice and Jenkins with such a momentum, that the original projects dried up in less than a year.Though, given the choice between Oracle and a true open source project, the decision should not be hard for anybody who understands the value of software freedom and the evolutive benefits that stem from global collaborative development.

8) MariaDB has leapt in popularity

In 2013 there was news about Wikipedia migrating its enormous wiki system from MySQL to MariaDB and about Google using MariaDB in their internal systems instead of MySQL. One of the MariaDB Foundation sponsors is Automatic, the company behind WordPress.com. Other notable examples are booking.com and Craigslist. Fedora and OpenSUSE have had MariaDB as the default SQL database option for years. With the releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 both these vendors ship MariaDB instead of MySQL and promises to support their MariaDB versions for the lifetime of the major distribution releases, that is up to 13 years.The last big distribution to get MariaDB was Debian (and based on it, Ubuntu). The” intent to package” bug in Debian was already filed in 2010 but it wasn’t until December 2013 that the bug finally got closed. This was thanks to Seravo staff who took care of packaging MariaDB 5.5 for Debian, from where it also got into Ubuntu 14.04. Later we have also packaged MariaDB 10.0, which will be included in the next Debian and Ubuntu releases in the first half of 2015.

9) Compatible and easy to migrate

MariaDB 5.5 is a complete drop-in-replacement for MySQL 5.5. Migrating to MariaDB is as easy as running apt-get install mariadb-server or the equivalent command on your chosen Linux flavor (which, in 2015, is likely to include MariaDB in the official repositories).Despite the migration being easy, we still recommend that database admins undertake their own testing and always back up their databases, just to be safe.

10) Migration might become difficult after 2015

In versions MariaDB 10.0 and MySQL 5.6 the forks have already started to diverge somewhat but most likely users can still just upgrade from 5.6 to 10.0 without problems. The compatibility between 5.7 and 10.1 in the future is unknown, so the ideal time to migrate is now while it is still hassle-free. If binary incompatibilities arise in the future, database admins can always still migrate their data by dumping it and importing it in the new database.

Comparing features – MySQL vs MariaDB

Many new and exciting features like Windows Functions, Roles or Common Table Expressions (CTE) are probably worth mentioning, but won’t be mentioned in this article. We’re all about comparing the two database engines, so, therefore, we’ll only discuss features which are available only in one of them, to allow you, our readers, to determine the engine that works better for you.

Let’s look into several features which are available only in one of the databases, exclusively:

1. 1. JSON datatype – Starting version 5.7, MySQL supports a native JSON data type defined by RFC 7159 that enables efficient access to data in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) documents.
      MariaDB decided not to implement this enhancement as they claim it’s not part of the SQL standard. Instead, to support replication from MySQL, they only defined an alias for JSON, which is actually a LONGTEXT column. MariaDB claims there is no significant performance difference between the two, but no benchmarks were done recently to support that claim.
      It’s worth noting that both MySQL and MariaDB offer different JSON related functions which allow easier access, parsing and retrieval of JSON data.
   2. Default authentication – In MySQL 8.0, caching_sha2_password is the default authentication plugin rather than mysql_native_password. This enhancement should improve security by using the SHA-256 algorithm.
   3. MySQL Shell – MySQL Shell is an advanced command-line client and code editor for MySQL. In addition to SQL, MySQL Shell also offers scripting capabilities for JavaScript and Python. You won’t be able to access MariaDB servers using mysqlsh, as MariaDB doesn’t support the MySQL X protocol.
   4. Encryption – MySQL encrypts redo/undo logs (when configured to do so), while it doesn’t encrypt temporary tablespace or binary logs. MariaDB, on the other hand, supports binary log encryption and temporary table encryption.
   5. Key Management – MariaDB offers an AWS key management plugin out of the box. MySQL also provides several plugins for key management, but they’re only available in the Enterprise edition.
   6. Sys schema – MySQL 8.0 includes the sys schema, a set of objects that helps database administrators and software engineers interpret data collected by the Performance Schema. Sys schema objects can be used for optimization and diagnosis use cases. MariaDB doesn’t have this enhancement included.
   7. Validate_password – The validate_password plugin’s goal is to test passwords and improve security. MySQL has this plugin enabled by default, while MariaDB doesn’t.
   8. Super read-only  – MySQL enhances the read_only capabilities by providing the super read-only mode. If the read_only system variable is enabled, the server permits client updates only from users who have the SUPER privilege. If the super_read_only system variable is also enabled, the server prohibits client updates even from users who have SUPER. See the description of the read_only.
   9. Invisible Columns – This feature, which is available on MariaDB, while not on MySQL, allows creating columns which aren’t listed in the results of a SELECT * statement, nor do they need to be assigned a value in an INSERT statement when their name isn’t mentioned in the statement.
   10. Threadpool – MariaDB supports connection thread pools, which are most effective in situations where queries are relatively short and the load is CPU bound (OLTP workloads). On MySQL’s community edition, the number of threads is static, which limits the flexibility in this situations. The enterprise plan of MySQL include threadpool capabilities
       

       Performance & Bench marking

       Over the years, many performance benchmark tests were executed on both MySQL and MariaDB engines. We don’t believe there is one answer to the question “which is faster, MySQL or MariaDB?”. It very much depends on the use case, the queries, the number of users and connections, and many other factors which should be considered.These are the most recent benchmark tests we found online, which might provide some indication to which one performs better.

       Replication

       Both databases provide the ability to replicate data from one server to another. The main difference we saw here is that most MariaDB versions will allow you to replicate to them, from MySQL databases, which means you can easily migrate MySQL databases to MariaDB. The other way around isn’t that easy, as most MySQL versions won’t allow replication from MariaDB servers.Also, it’s worth noting that MySQL GTID is different than MariaDB GTID, so once you replicate data from MySQL to MariaDB, the GTID data will be adjusted accordingly.

       Few examples to the differences between the replication configurations:

       • The default binlog format in MySQL is row based. In MariaDB, the default binlog format is mixed.
       • Log_bin_compress – This feature determines whether or not the binary log can be compressed. This enhancement is unique to MariaDB and therefore isn’t supported by MySQL.

       Incompatibilities between MySQL and MariaDB

       MariaDB’s documentation lists hundreds of incompatibilities between MySQL and MariaDB databases, in different versions. The main conclusion from this documentation is that you can’t rely on an easy migration from one database type to another.Most database administrators hoped that MariaDB will be kept as a branch of MySQL, so it will be very easy to migrate between the two. For the last few versions, that’s not the case anymore. For a long time now, MariaDB is actually a fork of MySQL, which means you need to put some thought when you migrate from one to another.

       Storage engines

       MariaDB supports more storage engines than MySQL. Said that, it’s not a matter of which database supports more storage engines, but rather which database supports the right storage engine for your requirements.

       • Supported storage engines on MariaDB: XtraDB, InnoDB, MariaDB ColumnStore, Aria, Archive, Blackhole, Cassandra Storage Engine, Connect, CSV, FederatedX, Memory storage engine, Merge, Mroonga, MyISAM, MyRocks, QQGraph, Sequence Storage Engine, SphinxSE, Spider, TokuDB.
       • Supported storage engines on MySQL – InnoDB, MyISAM, Memory, CSV, Archive, Blackhole, Merge, Federated, Example.

       Deployed on Linux distributions by default

       On some Linux distributions, when you install the MySQL database, you might end up actually installing the MariaDB database, as it’s the default in many Linux distributions (though not in all).

       MariaDB will be installed by default on latest Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS/Fedora/Debian distributions. On the other hand, MySQL is still the default on other popular distributions such as Ubuntu.

       Availability on cloud platforms

       MariaDB is available as a service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud.MySQL is available on all three platforms mentioned above, while also available on Google Cloud’s platform, as a managed service.Therefore, if you are using GCP and would like your cloud provider to manage the service for you, you might have to consider using MySQL, unless you would like to install and manage MariaDB instances on your own.

       Licensing

       MariaDB Server is licensed as GPLv2, while MySQL has two licensing options – GPLv2 (for Community edition) and Enterprise.The main difference between the two licenses for MySQL is the available features and support. While you receive the full-featured package when using MariaDB, that’s not the case with MySQL. The community edition doesn’t include features like the Threadpool, which can have a significant impact on the database and query performance.

       Release-rate and updates

       Usually, MariaDB has more frequent releases then MySQL. This reality has its pros and cons though. On the upside, features and bug fixes are released more frequently. On the other side, managing those MariaDB servers requires more updates to keep them up to do date at all times.

       Technical Support

       The MySQL support team, which includes both MySQL developers and support engineers, offer 24/7 support for customers. Oracle offers several support packages, including Extended support, Sustaining support and Premier support, depending on the customer’s requirements. MariaDB’s support team includes support engineers which are familiar and are experts with both MariaDB and MySQL databases (as many of the features were originally written by MySQL’s team). They offer enterprise support for production systems, with 24/7 availability.

       Ongoing Development

       For MySQL, the exclusive developer is Oracle’s MySQL team. On the other hand, MariaDB’s development process is open for a public vote and mailing lists discussions. In addition, anyone can submit patches to MariaDB, which will be considered to be added to the main repository. Therefore, in a way, MariaDB is developed by the community, while MySQL is developed primarily by Oracle.

       SQL Query Optimization

       Whether you choose MySQL or MariaDB as your database vendor, you’ll probably end up struggling with some slow queries slowing down your application.EverSQL offers an easy platform to optimize MySQL and MariaDB queries, which will highly contribute to the overall database performance.

       Features of MariaDB

MariaDB provides the same features of MySQL with some extensions. It is relatively new and advance.Following is a list of features of MariaDB:

• MariaDB is licensed under GPL, LGPL, or BSD.
• MariaDB includes a wide selection of storage engines, including high-performance storage engines, for working with other RDBMS data sources.
• MariaDB uses a standard and popular querying language.
• MariaDB runs on a number of operating systems and supports a wide variety of programming languages.
• MariaDB offers support for PHP, one of the most popular web development languages.
• MariaDB offers Galera cluster technology.
• MariaDB also offers numerous operations and commands unavailable in MySQL, and removes/changes features impacting performance destructively.

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Major Features of MariaDB

1.More Storage Engines

In addition to the standard MyISAM, BLACKHOLE, CSV, MEMORY, ARCHIVE, and MERGE storage engines, the following are also included with MariaDB Source and Binary packages:

• Aria
• XtraDB (drop-in replacement for InnoDB)
• FederatedX (drop-in replacement for Federated)
• OQGRAPH (In MariaDB 5.2, MariaDB 5.3 and MariaDB 10.0. Disabled in MariaDB 5.5 only.) — new in 5.2
• SphinxSE — new in 5.2
• IBMDB2I. Oracle removed this in MySQL 5.1.55 but we have kept the code in MariaDB until MariaDB 5.5.
• TokuDB in MariaDB 5.5 and MariaDB 10.0
• Cassandra in MariaDB 10.0
• We are working on adding other NoSQL storage engines into MariaDB.
• CONNECT in MariaDB 10.0
• SEQUENCE in MariaDB 10.0
• Spider in MariaDB 10.0
• ColumnStore, a column oriented storage engine optimized for Data warehousing.

2.Speed improvements

A lot of optimizer enhancements in MariaDB 5.3. Subqueries are now finally usable! The complete list and a comparison with MySQL is here. A benchmark can be found here.

• Faster and safer replication: Group commit for the binary log. This makes many setups that use replication and lots of updates more than 2x times faster.
• Lots of speed improvements when a client connects to MariaDB. Many of the improvements were done in MariaDB 10.1 and MariaDB 10.2.
• There are some improvements to the DBUG code to make its execution faster when debug is compiled in but not used.
• Lots of speed improvements when a client connects to MariaDB. Many of the improvements were done in MariaDB 10.1 and MariaDB 10.2
• Our use of the Aria storage engine enables faster complex queries (queries which normally use disk-based temporary tables). The Aria storage engine is used for internal temporary tables, which should give a speedup when doing complex selects. Aria is usually faster for temporary tables when compared to MyISAM because Aria caches row data in memory and normally doesn’t have to write the temporary rows to disk.
• The test suite has been extended and now runs much faster than before, even though it tests more things.

3.Extensions & new features

We’ve added a lot of new features to MariaDB. If a patch or feature is useful, safe, and stable — we make every effort to include it in MariaDB. The most notable features are:

• Microseconds in MariaDB — new in 5.3
• Number of supported decimals in DECIMAL has increased from 30 to 38. — new in 10.2
• Microsecond Precision in Processlist
• Table Elimination
• Virtual Columns — new in 5.2
• CHECK CONSTRAINT — new in 10.2
• DEFAULT expression, including DEFAULT for BLOB and TEXT. — new in 10.2
• Extended User Statistics — new in 5.2
• KILL all queries for a user — new in 5.3,
• KILL QUERY ID – terminates the query by query_id, leaving the connection intact — new in 10.0.5,
• Pluggable Authentication — new in 5.2
• Storage-engine-specific CREATE TABLE — new in 5.2
• Enhancements to INFORMATION SCHEMA.PLUGINS table — new in 5.2
• Group commit for the binary log. This makes replication notably faster! — new in 5.3
• Added –rewrite-db mysqlbinlog option to change the used database — new in 5.2
• Progress reporting for ALTER TABLE and LOAD DATA INFILE. — new in 5.3
• Faster joins and subqueries. — new in 5.3
• HandlerSocket and faster HANDLER calls. — new in 5.3
• Dynamic Columns support. — new in 5.3

4.Better Testing

• More tests in the test suite.
• Bugs in tests fixed.
• Test builds with different configure options to get better feature testing.
• Remove invalid tests. (e.g. don’t test feature ”X” if that feature is not in the tested build)

5.Fewer warnings and bugs

• Bugs are bad. Fix as many bugs as possible and try to not introduce new ones.
• Compiler warnings are also bad. Eliminate as many compiler warnings as possible.

6.Truly Open Source

• All code in MariaDB is released under GPL, LGPL or BSD.
• MariaDB does not have closed source modules like the ones that can be found in MySQL Enterprise Edition. In
• fact, all the closed source features in MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition are found in the MariaDB open source version.
• MariaDB client libraries (for C, for Java (JDBC), for Windows (ODBC)) are released under LGPL to allow
• linking with closed source software. MySQL client libraries are released under GPL that does not allow linking with closed source software.
• MariaDB includes test cases for all fixed bugs. Oracle doesn’t provide test cases for new bugs fixed in MySQL 5.5.
• All bugs and development plans are public.
• MariaDB is developed by the community in true open source spirit.

• Installation Instructions For Windows

Installation Instructions For Windows

A) Click the Windows “Start” button and select “All Programs” and then point to MariaDB

B) RDP Connection: To connect to the operating system,

1) Connect to virtual machine using following RDP credentials :

• Hostname: PublicDNS  / IP of machine
• Port : 3389

Username: To connect to the operating system, use RDP and the username is Administrator.
Password : Please Click here  to know how to  get password .

C) Other Information:

1.Default installation path: will be on your root folder “C:\Program Files\MariaDB 10.1”
2.Default ports:

• Windows Machines:  RDP Port – 3389
• Http: 80
• Https: 443

Configure custom inbound and outbound rules using this link

Installation Instructions For Ubuntu

Note: How to find PublicDNS in Azure

Step 1) SSH Connection: To connect to the deployed instance, Please follow Instructions to Connect to Ubuntu instance on Azure Cloud

1) Download Putty.

2) Connect to the virtual machine using following SSH credentials:

• Hostname: PublicDNS  / IP of machine
• Port : 22

Username: Your chosen username when you created the machine ( For example:  Azureuser)

Password: Your Chosen Password when you created the machine ( How to reset the password if you do not remember)

Step 2) Other Information:

1.Default ports:

• Linux Machines:  SSH Port – 22

2. To access Webmin interface for management please follow this link

Configure custom inbound and outbound rules using this link

Installation Step by Step Screenshots

Secured MariaDB on Ubuntu 16-04 LTS