MariaDB versus MySQL - Features

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:

• ColumnStore, a column oriented storage engine optimized for Data warehousing.
• MyRocks, a storage engine with great compression, in 10.2
• Aria, MyISAM replacement with better caching.
• FederatedX (drop-in replacement for Federated)
• OQGRAPH (In MariaDB 5.2 and later. Disabled in MariaDB 5.5 only.) — new in 5.2
• SphinxSE — new in 5.2
• TokuDB in MariaDB 5.5 and later.
• CONNECT in MariaDB 10.0 and later.
• SEQUENCE in MariaDB 10.0 and later.
• Spider in MariaDB 10.0 and later.
• Cassandra in MariaDB 10.0

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.
• Parallel replication. — new in 10.0
• Improvements for Innodb asynchronous IO subsystem on Windows.
• Indexes for the MEMORY(HEAP) engine are faster. According to a simple test, 24% faster on INSERT for integer index and 60% faster for index on a CHAR(20) column. Fixed in MariaDB 5.5 and MySQL 5.7.
• Segmented Key Cache for MyISAM. Can speed up MyISAM tables with up to 4x. — new in 5.2
• Adjustable hash size for MyISAM and Aria. This can greatly improve shutdown time (from hours to minutes) if you are using a lot of MyISAM/Aria tables with delayed keys. — new in 10.0.13
• CHECKSUM TABLE is faster.
• We improved the performance of character set conversions (and removed conversions when they were not really needed). Overall speed improvement is 1-5 % (according to sql-bench) but can be higher for big result sets with all characters between 0x00-0x7f.
• Pool of Threads in MariaDB 5.1 and even better in MariaDB 5.5. This allows MariaDB to run with 200,000+ connections and with a notable speed improvement when using many connections.
• 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.
• 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.

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
• GIS Functionality — new in 5.3
• Multi-source replication. — new in 10.0
• Global Transaction ID. — new in 10.0
• SHOW EXPLAIN gives the EXPLAIN plan for a query running in another thread. — new in 10.0
• Roles. — new in 10.0
• PCRE Regular Expressions (including REGEXP_REPLACE()). — new in 10.0
• DELETE ... RETURNING. — new in 10.0
• See also a detailed breakdown of System variable differences between MariaDB 5.5 and MySQL 5.5 and System variable differences between MariaDB 10.0 and MySQL 5.6.

For a full list, please see features for each release

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)

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.

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.

Related links

• Compatiblity between MariaDB and MySQL
• Moving from MySQL
• Troubleshooting Installation Issues