Why Pixid dropped Oracle and went hybrid with MariaDB

About Pixid Group

Pixid Group is a leading European recruitment technology provider, operating an end‑to‑end staffing platform that connects companies, staffing agencies, MSPs, and temporary workers across 39 European markets.

It offers a pure SaaS application to manage the temporary workforce, serving as a top European provider in flexible workforce digital management. Operating at a massive scale, Pixid handles over 290,000 connections per month, 180,000 assignments per day, and manages 90 million digitized documents.

The Challenge

Originally relying on a standalone Oracle server for transactions and a standalone InfiniDB server for analytics, Pixid faced the need to accommodate rapid international business growth while maintaining strict compliance, security, and performance constraints. Tasked with delivering simple, fast, and consolidated views of HR and financial data, they needed a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective hybrid database architecture

Why MariaDB?

As Pixid expanded its operations across Europe, the company needed an architecture that provided robust data redundancy, top-tier security (GDPR and ISO 27001 compliance), and optimal performance. They aimed to move away from expensive proprietary systems toward an adaptable, open-source enterprise model without sacrificing reliability.

Their evaluation criteria prioritized:

• A significant reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to Oracle.

• Scalable transactional processing capabilities that could smoothly handle nearly 100GB of live data.

• Advanced analytical processing with strong data redundancy through multi-server BI architecture.

• Expert third-party support to allow internal engineering teams to focus on their core SaaS business rather than database maintenance.

Ultimately, Pixid transitioned from their standalone legacy setups to a distributed MariaDB architecture.

How MariaDB Solved the Problem

By deploying a hybrid architecture featuring MariaDB Cluster for transactional workloads and MariaDB ColumnStore for business intelligence (BI), Pixid achieved substantial operational improvements:

Cost-Effectiveness: Pixid realized a highly attractive return on investment, with database costs divided by more than three compared to their equivalent Oracle solution.

Scalability and Performance: The transition to MariaDB Cluster effectively met Pixid’s strict performance constraints amidst the growth of their user activity. Additionally, MariaDB provided fast and efficient scalability for data redundancy via a multi-server UM/PM/GlusterFS architecture.

Streamlined Operations: By implementing a 24/7 Remote DBA service, Pixid gained a reactive, expert support team for performance analysis, patching, and script deployments, freeing their developers to focus entirely on core business operations.

Pixid is planning to expand this successful architecture into new projects, including utilizing MariaDB Cluster for its own private key infrastructure and migrating their electronic signature tools from Oracle to MariaDB.