MariaDB vs MySQL is a common comparison as both these are popular relational databases within an LAMP system.
What is MySQL?
MySQL is born in the mid 1990s. It is one of the first open-source database available in the market. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 and later in 2010 Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Therefore, Oracle owns MySQL since then. MySQL is a relational database management system that helps you to keep data organised in a database. MySQL uses the SQL language to query the database.
What is MariaDB?
MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL database management system. Therefore, MariaDB strives to become an improved version of MySQL. It comes with numerous inbuilt powerful features over MySQL. Unlike MySQL, MariaDB guarantees to be an open source database management system. The key benefits of MariaDB are as follow:
- It operates under GPL, BSD, or LGPL licenses
- MariaDB supports the popular and standard SQL querying language
- It comes with many storage engines, including the high-performance ones that can be integrated with other relational database management systems
- It offers the advanced Galera cluster technology.
- MariaDB supports PHP, a popular language for web development.
Comparison: MariaDB vs MySQL
The major differences between MariaDB and MySQL are as follow:
- MariaDB is Open Source whereas MySQL uses some proprietary code in its Enterprise Edition.
- Furthermore, MariaDB has 12 new storage engines whereas MySQL has lesser storage engines.
- Additionally, MariaDB supports up to 200,000+ connections whereas MySQL has smaller connection pool.
- In MariaDB, replication is faster whereas in MySQL, replication is slower.
- Comparatively MariaDB can be faster than MySQL.
- MariaDB does not support Data Masking and Dynamic column while MySQL supports it.
Conclusions
Each database management system has its own pros and cons. Although MariaDB has not enjoyed the market share growth as anticipated, its popularity is still high and growing in Europe and Asia. Regardless the choice of your database management system, NVMe based VPS cloud servers will always offer the benefits of speeding up your database queries.