When comparing MariaDB vs CockroachDB, the Slant community recommends MariaDB for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source Relational Databases?” MariaDB is ranked 4th while CockroachDB is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose MariaDB is:
All development decisions for MariaDB can be reviewed and debated on a public mailing list or in the public bug tracker. Contributing to MariaDB is easy and the patch flow is fully transparent and public. But it's not all about the code contribution either - MariaDB also has very active documentation efforts and other related things that help developers in their day-to-day database administration.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Truly open development community
All development decisions for MariaDB can be reviewed and debated on a public mailing list or in the public bug tracker. Contributing to MariaDB is easy and the patch flow is fully transparent and public. But it's not all about the code contribution either - MariaDB also has very active documentation efforts and other related things that help developers in their day-to-day database administration.
Pro More cutting edge features
e.g. GIS since 5.3
Pro Dynamic column support
MariaDB has dynamic column support which allows for some NoSQL type functionality. So one database interface can provide both SQL and NoSQL for different software development needs.
Pro High availability
Pro Distributed transactions
Pro Automated scaling & repair
Pro Cross Cloud Provider Replication/Migration
Run CockroachDB nodes in two or more cloud networks (AWS, GCP, Azure) and replicate the databases. Migrate from one cloud provider to another.
See this blog article for details: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cross-cloud-migration/
Pro SQL
Pro Strong consistency
Pro Simplified deployment
Cons
Con Immature project
Some important features are missing and heavy use in production is minimal.