MariaDB and CockroachDB compete in the database solutions category. MariaDB seems to have the upper hand with its open-source model offering flexibility and cost advantages.
Features: MariaDB is a user-friendly database known for reliability, high availability, and integration. Its advanced features include ColumnStore for analytics and the ability to utilize multiple cores for performance. CockroachDB is distinguished by its high fault tolerance and geo-replication, ideal for cross-regional deployments. It is compatible with PostgreSQL protocols, enhancing its integration capabilities.
Room for Improvement: MariaDB needs to improve enterprise integration, redundancy features, scalability, user interface, and technical support. It also requires better integration with BI tools and support for materialized views. CockroachDB has room to enhance PostgreSQL compatibility, integration features, and Change Data Capture capabilities. Store processes and disaster recovery features also need improvements.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: MariaDB can be deployed across on-premises and hybrid clouds, relying heavily on community support, with a noted desire for more direct support options. CockroachDB is praised for its ease of use in cloud environments and offers good technical support, though community engagement is common due to its open-source nature.
Pricing and ROI: MariaDB provides a cost advantage with its open-source offering, avoiding the licensing fees associated with commercial databases like Oracle. CockroachDB, potentially more costly, offers value through features beneficial for distributed solutions. Its pricing model is flexible, allowing users to select from enterprise or open-source options.
Product | Market Share (%) |
---|---|
MariaDB | 5.7% |
CockroachDB | 4.2% |
Other | 90.1% |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 7 |
Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
Large Enterprise | 5 |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 27 |
Midsize Enterprise | 12 |
Large Enterprise | 25 |
Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the cloud-native, resilient, distributed SQL database enterprises worldwide trust to run mission-critical AI and other applications that scale fast, avert and survive disaster, and thrive everywhere. It runs on the Big 3 clouds, on prem, and in hybrid configurations powering Fortune 500, Forbes Global 2000, and Inc. 5000 brands, and game-changing innovators, including OpenAI, CoreWeave, Adobe, Netflix, Booking.com, DoorDash, FanDuel, Cisco, P&G, UiPath, Fortinet, Roblox, EA, BestBuy, SpaceX, Nvidia, the USVA, and HPE. Cockroach Labs has customers in 40+ countries across all world regions, 25+ verticals, and 50+ Use Cases. Cockroach Labs operates its own ISV Partner Ecosystem powering Payments, Identity Management (IDM/IAM), Banking & Wallet, Trading, and other high-demand use cases. Cockroach Labs is an AWS Partner of the Year finalist and has achieved AWS Competency Partner certifications in Data & Analytics and Financial Services (FSI). CockroachDB pricing is available at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
Vector, RAG, and GenAI Workloads
CockroachDB includes native support for the VECTOR data type and pgvector API compatibility, enabling storage and retrieval of high-dimensional embeddings. These vector capabilities are critical for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and GenAI workloads that rely on similarity search and contextual embeddings. By supporting distributed vector indexing within the database itself, CockroachDB removes the need for external vector stores and allows AI applications to operate against a single, consistent data layer.
C-SPANN Distributed Indexing
At the core of CockroachDB’s vector search capabilities is the C-SPANN indexing engine. C-SPANN provides scalable approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search across billions of vectors while supporting incremental updates, real-time writes, and partitioned indexing. This ensures low-latency retrieval in the tens of milliseconds, even under high query throughput. The algorithm eliminates central coordinators, avoids large in-memory structures, and leverages CockroachDB’s sharding and replication to deliver scale, resilience, and global consistency.
Machine Learning and Apache Spark Integration
CockroachDB integrates with modern ML workflows by supporting embeddings generated through frameworks such as AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. Its compatibility with the PostgreSQL JDBC driver allows seamless integration with Apache Spark, enabling distributed processing and advanced analytics on CockroachDB data.
PostgreSQL Compatibility and JSON Support
CockroachDB speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so applications, drivers, and tools designed to work with Postgres can connect to CockroachDB without modification, enabling seamless use of familiar SQL features and integration with the wider Postgres ecosystem. This includes support for advanced data types such as JSON and JSONB, which allow developers to store and query semi-structured data natively.
Geospatial and Graph Capabilities
CockroachDB also provides first-class geospatial data support, allowing developers to store, query, and analyze spatial data directly in SQL. For graph workloads, CockroachDB employs JSON flexibility to represent relationships and delivers query capabilities for graph-like traversals. This combination enables hybrid applications that merge relational, geospatial, document, and graph data within a single platform.
Analytics, BI, and Integration
To support high-performance analytics and BI, CockroachDB supports core analytical use cases and functions including Enterprise Data Warehouse, Lakehouse, and Event Analytics, and offers materialized views for precomputing complex joins and aggregations. Its PostgreSQL wire compatibility ensures direct connectivity with all relevant BI and analytics apps and tools including Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Kafka, Google BigQuery, Salesforce Tableau, Databricks, Cognos, Looker, Grafana, Power BI, Qlik Sense, SAP, SAS, Sisense, and TIBCO Spotfire. Data scientists can interact with CockroachDB through Jupyter Notebooks, querying structured and semi-structured data and loading results for analysis. Change data capture (CDC) streams provide real-time updates to analytics pipelines and feature stores, keeping downstream systems fresh and reliable. Columnar vectorized execution accelerates query processing, optimizes transactional throughput, and minimizes latency for demanding distributed workloads.
MOLT AI-Powered Migration
Organizations often know their data infrastructure is not supporting the business, but find it too painful to change. CockroachDB’s MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) is designed to enable safe, minimal-downtime database migrations from legacy systems to CockroachDB. MOLT Fetch supports data migration from PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, with SQL Server and DB2 coming soon. CockroachDB also has a portfolio of data replication platform integrations including Precisely, Striim, Qlik, Confluent, IBM, etc.
Together, these capabilities ensure that CockroachDB supports both operational and analytical workloads, bridging traditional SQL applications with emerging Gen AI and ML use cases.
MariaDB is an open source relational database created by the original founders of MySQL. It is considered one of the most popular and trusted database servers throughout the world. MariaDB is a valued component found in most cloud offerings and is the default in many Linux tools. It is also widely used by Wikipedia, WordPress, and Google, among other well-known sites. Maria DB easily melds data into concise information from a vast array of applications, such as banking, online shopping, websites, and more.
MariaDB was originally created to improve MySQL performance. It is the most widely chosen database server due to the solution being super fast, robust, user-friendly, and easily scalable. MariaDB also offers a substantial ecosystem of plugins, storage engines, and numerous other valuable tools that make it very attractive for a significant offering of use cases.
The solution’s newest functionalities include compatibility with Oracle Database and Temporal Data Tables, and advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, which make it easier for users to research data history from any point in the past. Additionally, the most recent versions include JSON and GIS features. MariaDB is committed to staying an open source solution.
MariaDB Features
Reviews from Real Users
Faustine C., Engineering Supervisor- Corporate Data Solutions and Services at TZ Telecoms Corporation, shares, “The software provides a lot of information on what is happening inside the database. For most performance parameters it is easy to know if something is not right in the configuration or optimization which helps engineers take remedial fine-tuning measures. For example, if the database is underperforming it is easy to know which performance parameter can be adjusted to handle the workload. It is difficult to troubleshoot database issues if many performance parameters can not be monitored or debugged which is the case with some database management systems. It provides great monitoring of data storage, processing, and performance stability which is really important for real-time data storage and processing. It's a user-friendly product.”
A PeerSpot user who is a Senior Engineer at a tech services company relates, “ The solution's high availability is its most valuable aspect. We have found the product to be stable and the initial setup is pretty simple. I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I'm very happy with it overall. I would recommend the solution to others. It's easy to find details about the product online and to learn about it.”
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