MariaDB Articles

The JSON keyword in MariaDB is a compatibility alias over LONGTEXT. It migrates schemas cleanly, then surprises you at scale: full parses per row, whole-document rewrites per update, and equality semantics that differ from MySQL.

MariaDB's InnoDB is a maintained fork with its own defaults: the change buffer is gone in 11.0, flushing defaults to O_DIRECT, the redo log was rewritten, and half of every MySQL tuning guide quietly stops applying.

A two-node Galera cluster survives fewer failures than a single node. Here is the quorum arithmetic behind that, how garbd breaks ties, what a non-primary component actually does to your writes, and how to bootstrap safely after a full outage.

A Galera node rejoin either streams a small delta (IST) or copies the entire dataset (SST), and whether any donor's gcache still holds the joiner's missing writesets decides which. Here is how the decision is made, how to size for…

gcache.size is the difference between a node rejoining in three minutes via IST and a two-hour full SST that hammers the donor. Here is how the ring buffer works, how to size it from wsrep_replicated_bytes, and how to verify the…

An ADD COLUMN on one Galera node froze writes on all three for forty minutes. Here is what TOI really does to the cluster, how to run RSU node by node without aborting one, and the DDL decision runbook.

Someone forgot the WHERE clause. You can restore last night's backup and replay a day of binlog, or you can generate the inverse transaction and apply it in minutes. Here is how MariaDB flashback actually works.

MariaDB can store optimizer statistics as ordinary data in mysql.table_stats, column_stats and index_stats — histograms included. Here is how to turn it on, keep it fresh, and stop guessing why a plan changed.

The audit checkbox says 'encrypt data at rest'; the operations reality is key custody, background rotation threads, a binlog that stays plaintext until you say otherwise, and a recovery plan that dies with the key file. The honest field guide.

MaxScale's readwritesplit router gives your application one endpoint and spreads reads across replicas. Here is how routing decisions are made, where session state bites, and how failover coordination works.