Explains practical reasons and steps to adopt MariaDB instead of Oracle for transactional workloads.
MariaDB is open-source, license-friendly, and MySQL-compatible, letting teams avoid Oracle’s high TCO while keeping enterprise-grade features like replication and clustering.
No per-core licensing or support lock-ins. Cloud images and on-prem packages are free; optional support contracts are fraction of Oracle’s.
Most ANSI SQL statements run unmodified.Functions like NOW(), IFNULL(), and AUTO_INCREMENT columns replace Oracle sequences and SYSDATE.
CREATE TABLE Customers (id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, name VARCHAR(100));
Yes. ColumnStore, InnoDB, and parallel replication deliver high throughput.Partitioning, query plan caching, and optimizer hints reduce latency.
pt-online-schema-change for zero-downtime DDL, Galera for multi-master HA, and ProxySQL for routing and connection pooling.
Dump Oracle objects to CSV or use ora2pg, then load with LOAD DATA INFILE
.Verify counts, triggers, and stored procedures.
Enable slow-query log, set innodb_buffer_pool_size to 70-80% of RAM, and schedule ANALYZE TABLE
after bulk loads.
Skipping character-set review—always align NLS settings with MariaDB’s utf8mb4
. Ignoring permission refactors—map Oracle roles to MariaDB GRANT
s.
SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Threads_running';
• EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON SELECT ...;
• SET GLOBAL innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2;
.
Not fully. ANSI SQL overlaps, but PL/SQL packages, sequences, and proprietary functions need rewriting or ora2pg conversion.
Yes, Galera Cluster offers synchronous multi-master replication, giving near-RAC levels of availability at lower complexity.
Use MariaDB table partitioning plus event-scheduler to refresh summary tables, or switch to ColumnStore for real-time analytics.