K1 Buys MariaDB (opens in new tab)

At scale, there are some workloads where it can be a great choice:

* InnoDB (default storage engine in MySQL and MariaDB) uses a clustered index, which can handle an extremely high volume of primary key range scan queries

* Ability to handle several thousand connections per second without needing a proxy or pool (the connection model in MySQL and MariaDB is multi-threaded instead of multi-process)

* Workloads that lean heavily on UPDATE or DELETE have terrible MVCC pain (vacuum) in Postgres, rarely a problem in MySQL or MariaDB due to using an undo log design

* Support for index hints and forced indexes, preventing huge outages when the query planner makes a random mistake at an off hour

* Built-in support for direct I/O is important for very high-volume OLTP workloads -- InnoDB's buffer pool design is completely independent of filesystem/OS caching

* If you need best-in-industry compression, the MyRocks storage engine is easy to use in MariaDB

* Logical replication can handle DDL out-of-the-box in FOSS MariaDB or MySQL, whereas in Postgres you must pay for an enterprise solution

* Much better collation support out-of-the-box

* Tooling ecosystem which includes multiple battle-tested external online schema change tools, for safely making alterations of any type to tables with billions of rows

* MariaDB has built-in support for using system-versioned tables, application-time periods, or both (bitemporal tables)

That all said -- Postgres is an amazing database with many awesome features which MariaDB lacks. Overall unless your situation is very high scale or an unusual edge-case, it's usually best to just go with what you know / what your team knows / what you can hire for, etc.

I would say the main advantage is scale and uptime. If you need to replicate, duplicate, or maintain state beyond one server; there are very few good RDBMS options, let alone open source. The MariaDB ecosystem competes with IBM Purescale and Oracle RAC; it's hard to appreciate that, until you really need it.

My reason has been relative simplicity. PostgreSQL comes off as much more complex (though whether that is actually true is probably dependent on what you're doing with it).

I'm also not working with super-high-performance production-critical loads, though, so grain of salt and all that.

MariaDB scales much better, with native clustering support, native partitioning support, as well as better single-node performance: https://www.databasebenchmarks.net/benchmark-charts.html

Native bitemporal tables: https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/temporal-tables-part-5/

All of these sibling comments are listing good technical reasons but the most compelling reason by far that I’ve run into for using MariaDB over Postgres is that the underlying software you are trying to deploy only supports MySQL/MariaDB. When my options are “MariaDB” or “Use an entirely different application” I often opt for MariaDB

I know it may seem like a weird reason but I think MySQL Workbench is a MUCH better tool than any other open source interface for interacting with PostgreSQL. I usually use PostgreSQL for other reasons, but MySQL Workbench is the main thing which makes the decision difficult for me.

They are honestly equally fine for most use cases. I find MariaDB tooling better and have a lower mental overhead dealing with it, but perhaps I'm just more used to it.

We used to hit a wall when reaching 100bn rows on MySQL but that was 15 years ago.

Scale and ease of “sysadmin” level management for things such as clustering, replication, etc.

Some of that will be personal preference but I’ve never found administration of a Postgres database cluster to be nearly as intuitive as MySQL/MariaDB.

From the experience of my one man big web project with 12 languages I had a hard time setting up a search that ignores things like éê from other languages in postgres while mariadb innodb just ignores it.

They’re both great systems but there are a few differences primarily in small ways for most applications:

Maria supports partitioning, Postgres (as of my last knowledge) does not.

Unstructured data is more flexible in Maria natively, but Postgres can support it in a variety of ways.

You can find lists and lists of head to head comparisons out there which will highlight all of the niche differences that each brings over the other.

Ultimately either will work just fine for 99% of use cases.

For a legacy system originally built on MySQL back before Postgres was so strong.

I’d say less. This acquisition screams that some MBA looked at their financials, saw money left on table, likely by not completely screwing over customers, and said, let’s do this! Think Broadcom/VMware on smaller scale.

You don’t put yourself in debt and replace the CEO unless you see some value not currently being realized.

They might even try license shenanigans but with GPLv2, not sure what they can do.

I moved to postgres over a decade ago but have occasionally had to interlope into MySQL/MariaDB infrastructure. IMHO it has been a lesser choice for a long time, typically just clinging onto it because of legacy reasons or an over-involved executive but these people are also typically very proud and protective over the thing they know.

Realistically if you need the MySQL semantics (eww) and wire protocol TiDB or a hosted offering like Aurora DB have been better choices for a long time now.

From my POV, it's a supplier that is no longer beholden to shareholders demands for profit. A platform and service that can operate using customer sourced revenue and respond to market demand without a profit driven board is a big win for everyone while funding development and maintenance of a great open source project.

I jumped ship from mysql/mariadb to psql over a decade ago and can't imagine why I would ever look back.

I did not realize MySQL was also named after one of his kids.

He already has Max. MaxDB sounds like good name tbh.

Developers and on HN sure, but the web runs on LAMP (mostly WP). Also, it is sure possible to optimise your postgres setup, but we had some scaling/sharding niche cases where mysql worked and performed out of the box and postgres was (is) struggling; I am not very interested wasting my life trying to get it to work while mysql just works without any tweaking (for that case: other cases we still pick mysql as it always performs the same or better than postgres for our cases; it doesn't have all the features pg has, but we don't need those (yet)). I have not seen the reverse yet.

> as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL

As in the hype train? They used to love mongodb in its broken state.

If only most of them actually investigate, compare and evaluate to make this choice.

It is mostly Oracle and SQL Server around here.

MariaDB Server is GPL and must always remain GPL, as it's a fork of MySQL which was also GPL.

Also the MariaDB Foundation is separate from the commercial/enterprise entity MariaDB plc. This article is about the latter being taken private.

At least twice.

Interesting thought. I wonder if someone did analyses on how long K1 tends to keep their companies before exist, and what is typical exit path - sell to strategic (Oracle? IBM?) sell to some other PE or take public