When comparing MariaDB vs Oracle Database, the Slant community recommends MariaDB for most people. In the question“What are the best relational databases?” MariaDB is ranked 3rd while Oracle Database is ranked 7th. 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 World wide technical support
Oracle is a large company with specialists in a lot of countries. It's very easy to find consultants and any kind of help with Oracle.
Pro Useful features for daily workflow
Some of the most important features are the partitioning option, active data guard, and security options. All of these are very useful for daily workflow.
Pro Stable
Pro Secure
Pro Scalable
Pro Reduced downtime during upgrades
Oracle Database has parallel upgrading for high available applications. Updates are made in parallel without keeping the database down.
Pro High performance parallel quesries
Oracle Database has introduced concurrent execution of union branches, which means that one set of parallel servers will execute one branch, a second set will execute another branch and so on. Instead of the old system where each branch executed one after the other.
Cons
Con Proprietary
Con Terrible company reputation
Oracle is very (in)famous for being involved in a number of controversies. Some of them have ended up in lawsuits with other tech companies because of license disputes. The latest one is a lawsuit against Google for Google's implementation of JAVA in their Android ecosystem.
Con Ghost data
To work around ghost data you can after encrypting something, manually move everything out of the old table space and then shred those data files. To be able to get rid of ghost data automatically would be great.