We are living in an era, where Data is treated as a vital asset for any organization. The Database acts as a backbone for any business, and it is critical for holding the humongous data of any enterprise.
We have seen a massive movement in the open-source database landscape, and MariaDB is a striking example of that pace.
MariaDB has risen to attain the status of one of the most reliable and robust open-source databases in use today.
But is MariaDB database suitable for your business? If your answer is Yes, then we will explore how you can migrate to MariaDB without impacting your business.
In this blog, we will give you an overview of MariaDB, how it works, its features and advantages, and methods to migrate to MariaDB from your existing database.
MariaDB is a highly popular open-source RDBMS relational database management system and could be used as a worthy replacement for MySQL. It was developed by the developers of MySQL. In October 2009, Oracle acquired MySQL, which led to many suspicions over the future of MySQL.
However, Oracle launched an innovative product MariaDB, which picked up its versioning from MySQL (version 5.1).
MariaDB is licensed under the GNU, and it is open-source and freely available. The developer named it after his second daughter, and it was developed as an easy replacement for MySQL. MariaDB can easily store data in various tables, and it is an in-built database solution for many Linux distributions and cloud offerings.
Just like other RDBMS solutions, MariaDB also uses a client/server model, where the server program caters to the requests from client programs.
As a relational database management system, MariaDB manages predefined relationships between several data items. These data items are well organized in tables, columns, and rows. Each row contains a primary key, whereas rows among multiple tables can be created by using the foreign keys.
MariaDB’s relational model ensures that data tables, indexes, and views remain separate from the physical storage of the database. It helps database administrators in managing the physical data without impacting the access to that data as a logical structure.
Logical operations allow apps to identify the content required, whereas physical operations specify how the data must be accessed and how the tasks should be carried out. MariaDB development is undoubtedly a simple yet powerful and widely adapted RDBMS solution for organizations of all sizes and shapes.
It is an innovative drop-in storage engine for MariaDB. It offers numerous features to enhance the database performance and it allows better scaling on modern hardware and environments.
It is open-source software that was developed by Facebook’s database engineering team. It is an alpha-stage storage engine, that is highly optimized for fast data storage with lowlatency. It offers better storage efficiency, higher IO capacity for managing queries, and keeps the operational cost low.
It is a general-purpose storage engine, that offers high performance and reliability. It offers ACID-compliant transaction features and provides support for foreign keys. It guarantees that every data transaction is considered a single unit. If that transaction unit fails, then the complete transaction is considered a failure, and the database is left intact.
It allows database administrators to develop sequences of numbers (ascending or descending order) with a given incremental, starting, and ending value. This helps us develop virtual ephemeral tables.
It is a “true Multi-Master Cluster” based on synchronous replication. It offers high up-time, unprecedented scalability, and prevents loss of data. It ensures no data loss if the slave node crashes, and it also prevents any sort of lag in the transaction.
It is very much capable of making changes in any node at any time, it also handles multi-threads for improved performance. It comes with a Hot Standby feature that ensures no downtime during a failover activity.
MariaDB offers some exceptional benefits for businesses, and that is why it is so popular. Let’s cover some of its advantages:
MariaDB’s installation is very easy, and it makes your Database Admins’ life easy. MariaDB offers two installation options: install MariaDB as a stand-alone server or set it up and use it along with an Analytical Processing/Hybrid Transactional platform.
It could be deployed as an on-premises solution or could be hosted on the cloud. You can run it on a container or a server.
MariaDB makes it possible for you to execute queries that are outside of your usual operation. It ensures you are not limited to only analyzing data with structured methods. It empowers your organization to keep the database foundation flexible and scale the requests whenever required.
It offers exceptional performance and compression while working with massive databases. It enables administrators to optimize the database operations by moving workloads to different storage types.
MariaDB enables you to continue your traditional database operations using a row-based approach, whereas the analytical data could be shifted to columnar storage.
MariaDB is designed to handle billions of records and fetch results in seconds. It supports robust parallel processing, which makes a significant difference in the analytics speed of a database. It allows you to scale your system and infrastructure as your data sets grow in the future.
Nowadays organizations collect, analyze, and process astronomical data. Hence, it is crucial to have a strong and flexible database structure that can help you derive value out of this humongous information.
MariaDB’s Column Store can handle multiple petabytes of data, that can easily accommodate the ever-expanding data sources in this dynamic business world.
MariaDB comes with cloud-native support to store the data. It helps your organization keep the data storage cost low, as you can use object storage services instead of investing in an in-house storage solution.
MariaDB works well with all cloud vendors (Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure), and it comes with various configurations and utilities to get incorporated with these platforms.
Industries and Businesses are facing rapid transformation overnight due to frequent market disruption, consumer behavioral changes, technological advancement, and several other factors.
If your organization is reluctant to make quick data-driven decisions to achieve its goals, then it is bound to suffer in the future.
MariaDB offers effective data analytics, deep insights, and the necessary agility to react and adapt to the ever-changing market dynamics.
MariaDB offers easy Data imports and Migration to ensure your business doesn’t suffer from any challenges.
It supports a wider range of connectors such as Spark, Java, Kafka, Python, and C. It provides a streamlined data import experience, that allows you to import data set from various data sources and use them as input for your analytic tools.
Here we will explain the process to migrate from your existing RDBMS to MariaDB. However, let’s start with the strategies you must use to implement a seamless database migration.
We have several strategies to move data from legacy RDBMS to Maria DB, each one has its own set of pros and cons.
Here all the database objects are migrated by database admins manually. It is tedious, but it gives complete control over the process.
Here you can utilize tools like Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS), which can assist you to migrate data and the table structures (DDL).
In this strategy, you can use several commercial tools to migrate data and other aspects of the Database automatically. This strategy saves time, effort, and cost as well.
Here it is important to understand that you must convert the stored procedures manually due to the complex nature of the process, and it requires manual rewriting of the code.
The migration from MySQL to MariaDB is certainly the easiest migration you may perform. Here are the steps you need to follow for Linux OS :
Step 1 – Take a backup of your MySQL data files.
# mysqldump –all-databases –user=root –password –master-data >backupDB.sql
Step 2– Please ensure your package manager has access to MariaDB.
Step 3– Stop MySQL using the following command.
sudo service mysql stop
Step 4– Install MariaDB using the following commands
apt install MariaDB-server
That’s it, it will install the MariaDB on your operating system.
You can migrate data from Oracle to MariaDB by using ESF Database Migration Toolkit. It is a wonderful tool that fulfills all complex migration tasks and saves a lot of time and effort.
Step 1 – Open the migration tool, and open the “Choose a Data Source” dialog and select “Oracle”.
Step 2 – Input the Server name and port (default.: 1521).
Step 3 – Choose MariaDB from the “Choose a Destination” dialog box
Step 4 – Select tables/views to be migrated from “Select source Tables(s) & View(s)” dialog box. This option is also used to remap the table structure and select other table-specific options.
Step 5 – In the “Execution” dialog box, click on the “Submit” button to initiate the migration process. The toolkit also helps you seamlessly migrate the data from an existing database to MariaDB without any sort of intervention.
Step 6 – Click “Browse Log” to check the migration log. Here click on “Save as job” to store migration settings to a job file. It helps you to quickly execute the migration job from the command prompt or reload the migration job in the future.
Step 7–The migration process will be completed and generate a migration report for your reference.
We can use ESF Database Migration Toolkit to migrate from the SQL server to the MariaDB database. It is a wonderful tool that fulfills all complex migration tasks and saves a lot of time and effort.
Step 1 – Open the tool and open the “Choose a Data Source” dialog. Select “SQL Server”.
Step 2 – Input the SQL Server name, and input server port if you are using the TCP/IP method.
Step 3 – Choose MariaDB from the “Choose a Destination” dialog box
Step 4 – Select tables/views to be migrated from “Select source Tables(s) & View(s)” dialog box. This option is also used to remap the table structure and select other table-specific options. Here you can choose the suitable data transfer method (Empty Data/Overwrite Table/Skip Table/Append Data).
Step 5 – In the “Execution” dialog box, click on the “Submit” button to initiate the migration process. The toolkit also helps you seamlessly migrate the data from an existing database to MariaDB without any sort of intervention.
Step 6 – Click “Browse Log” to check the migration log. Here click on “Save as job” to store migration settings to a job file. It helps you to quickly execute the migration job from the command prompt or reload the migration job in the future.
Step 7 – The migration process will be completed and generate a migration report for your reference.
If the Data content and format in the target and legacy system is different due to migration activity, then it is known as data corruption.
Data integrity issues could crop up during database migration due to any anomalies, redundant data, or presence of non-meaningful data. These issues can affect the operation and business efficiency and may defeat the purpose of migration.
Database migration experts must validate the target and legacy system data to prevent Data corruption and Integrity issues.
Data loss happens when data available in the legacy system is not available in the target system past migration. Data loss is unarguably the highest risk and it may devastate the business operations.
The cost and efforts required to remediate the data loss could prove detrimental to your organization’s reputation. However, this could be prevented by implementing two folded reconciliation (Key financial column reconciliation and Count Reconciliation) methodologies.
Sometimes the meaning of target and legacy column holds similar meanings, but the measurement unit could be different, and their meaning could be completely changed. Here the data migration could be successful but not useful in terms of objective.
To prevent such challenges, we must engage the migration experts and real-time users to conduct a thorough feasibility study, that may help us to detect such semantic issues at an early stage of the project life cycle. We must include test cases to identify incompatibilities and inconsistencies between the migrated data and parameters of the target app.
For organizations that require a true open-source RDBMS solution, then MariaDB is certainly the best one in the market. However, migrating from your legacy database to MariaDB is indeed a complex and crucial process for your organization.
It is important to select a database that aligns with your organizational objectives and that can help it scale and manage the massive data sets. We are hopeful that this blog will help you understand various aspects of MariaDB and assist you with the migration process.
In case you are still doubtful about the process, then please get in touch with our MariaDB experts, who can help you with the hassle-free database migration.
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