For some of the best features from each, Percona (either standard Percona 8.0, which gives features like MariaDB's thread-pool, more comprehensive encryption including redo-logs etc., or XtraDB-Cluster to go with Galera instead of Innodb Cluster) offers quite a few benefits/improvements (and is contributing a lot of bugfixes/improvements upstream). MySQL 5.7 is pretty solid, and they have been improving defaults (while leaving the option to enable compat settings which are necessary when migrating a large deployment between versions), and MySQL 8.0 has some really nice improvements. To be clear, I like MariaDB, but Oracle isn't doing a bad job on MySQL. > If you go enterprise, there isn’t much out there as accessible as maxscale for transaction failover! Yep, versioned tables are a nice feature that I don't think are available in any other MySQL-like DB. AFAIK MariaDB copied XtraBackup as mariabackup (not criticising them for doing this, just pointing out that Percona did the original heavy lifting on this). Percona wrote a similar implementation (XtraBackup), which works for MySQL, Percona, and MariaDB. MySQL has had "MySQL Enterprise Backup" for a long time. > easy horizontal scale (huge numbers that make db2 and oracle sweat), s3 backed tables, non blocking backups, make it too slow to be practical either). multi-source replication (the use cases where you're going to run out of disk, in most cases spider's un-implemented push-down join etc. Yes, it's neat that MariaDB merged it and is keeping it working, but there don't seem to be many use cases where it ends up being significantly better than e.g. I played with Spider in MariaDB 10.3, and it didn't satisfy the requirements we had, and it doesn't seem to have progressed significantly since then. MySQL also has their own Paxos-compliant clustering solution (called "Innodb cluster"), first available in 5.7, but much better in 8.0: Galera is available in MySQL-compatible binaries from Percona (Percona-XtraDB-Cluster). > spider for sharding and galera are all built in and actively maintained. MySQL 5.7 supports multi-source replication: If you go enterprise, there isn’t much out there as accessible as maxscale for transaction failover! There have been a few free online conferences during the pandemic, and MariaDB now has its own place at fosdem not just bundled in with mysql. There are new public developer resources and the connectors are feature rich and well loved. The list goes on, and many industry veterans from ibm, oracle, sybase etc are finding a home there and helping MariaDB grow. Online schema changes, easy horizontal scale (huge numbers that make db2 and oracle sweat), s3 backed tables, non blocking backups, flashback, versioned tables. Oracle attempted to extort anyone trying to licence a mysql based product(rip infobright), so infinidb and clustrix, now respectively called columnstore and xpand, have new homes with MariaDB and are core parts of the system.
MariaDB and the original InnoDB developers are now doing heavy rewrites with big performance gains, replication options like multi-source, spider for sharding and galera are all built in and actively maintained. Mysql and MariaDB diverged from versions 5.6 and 10 respectively, although MariaDB can and does still merge some fixes from mysql oracle don’t do that.