We performed a comparison between MariaDB and SQL Server based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: MariaDB is the winner when it comes to ease of use, initial setup and price. SQL Server comes out on top when it comes to performance, scalability, and support.
"What I like best about MariaDB is that it is open-source and reliable."
"The most valuable feature is that it uses multiple cores, which is better than some of the other databases."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source product and offers its users great online community support."
"The solution is very stable. It was originally built under MySQL. It has a similar level of stability."
"I would say that for most use cases it works fine."
"The documentation is quite straightforward."
"The product has been stable and reliable."
"A valuable feature is that we can use it for quite a few things, all the things you'd expect from a server—along the lines of Linux's Lightweight Directory."
"We have found the feature that allows us to publish web applications to be valuable."
"The solution is very easy to use. It's intuitive and easy to navigate. Overall, it's a straightforward product."
"They have improved the UI and ease of accessing the database and server which is good. You can load it up and start using it from the very minute it is implemented."
"SQL Server's performance is fine."
"It is easy to use and easy to perform a backup."
"I like that it's relatively stable."
"Easy to implement and user-friendly relational database management system. This product is stable and scalable."
"Comparing with other database management systems that I tried in other companies, SQL Server is quite easy to install, configure, and maintain."
"MariaDB can improve by adding more features. There are a lot of features, which are available in Oracle, and which are not available in MariaDB. We hope they will introduce the features soon."
"The interface should be more user-friendly. It should be able to connect directly to the database and Interact with it without having to use commands. It needs better integration."
"In future releases, mainly the addition of security features would be beneficial for MariaDB."
"It does not have tools for debugging procedures and functions."
"Maria DB has to improve from a management perspective."
"I am editing."
"It doesn't have the same level of maturity metrics as Postgres."
"The PL/SQL performance is slow if you have big batch jobs running overnight."
"The price could be better. It costs a lot, and competing databases like Postgres are free."
"They have too many licensing options. They may want to simplify its licensing and bring it down to two, three, or four categories from ten to fifteen categories. Having so many different licensing options makes it difficult to decide which one to choose from. They can club things together. This is an area where they can make things easier for customers."
"The solution could offer better integration with other solutions - specifically Microsoft."
"More things in SQL Server need to be automated."
"Other than Synapse and the other version of SQL Server, they face some problems while processing the data."
"When we are talking about event space architecture, scalability generally comes into play. For example, I might have a hundred thousand transactions a second, and then all of a sudden, I build something that everybody in the world wants. The next thing I know is that I have a million transactions a second. So, to be able to process the throughput, I'd have to scale up, and then when the holidays are over, I'm again down to a hundred thousand transactions, and I want to scale back down. SQL Server is not going to do that. In this way, it is not very scalable. One of the reasons why they want us to use Kafka is so that if we need to, we can do that, but our base program is on SQL Server. So, this is where we would use a Kafka event stack so that if I need more servers, I can just write a command, and I can have more consumers, more brokers, and more producers, and when the holiday season is over, it scales right back down again. SQL Server is not going to do that."
"There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to limited compatibility across the platform and restricted performance with massive data sets."
"I would like to have the option to use fewer processors for certain tasks, thus reducing the licensing fee."
MariaDB is ranked 5th in Relational Databases Tools with 30 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 22 reviews. MariaDB is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of MariaDB writes "Allows for fetching data from multiple correlated or related databases in a single query, user-friendly and easy to handle". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Stores all of our data, and there is nothing that it can't do". MariaDB is most compared with PostgreSQL, Oracle Database, MySQL, Firebird SQL and Percona Server, whereas SQL Server is most compared with SAP HANA, Oracle Database, IBM Db2 Database, LocalDB and Teradata. See our MariaDB vs. SQL Server report.
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