MariaDB Vs Percona For WordPress Installation

Regular visitors of this website probably noticed we preferentially use Percona MySQL in our tutorials and scripts. Whereas, most of the sysadmin related websites and guides for installation of WordPress uses MariaDB. Here is a Practical Comparison of MariaDB Vs Percona For WordPress Installation. Do we have any special reason to prefer Percona MySQL? Yes. We are long term users of Percona. We are more used with tools and stuffs of Percona. MariaDB and Percona probably does not have any difference. This also applies to the use of their complementary tools, for example, most of the MariaDB GUI also supports Percona. Indeed, MariaDB is suitable for some non-WordPress database works. Many articles on the web may tend to point towards either wrong things or outdated things.

WordPress stores all data except images in MySQL database. The MySQL server returns the result of that query, and the PHP continues to execute the WordPress PHP files. WordPress uses default MySQL database engine. Which before MySQL version 5.5 was MyISAM. MyISAM has performance issues. InnoDB is practical choice as database engine and that is the reason 4 years back we had guides like MyISAM vs Innodb MySQL Engine.

MariaDB Vs Percona For WordPress Installation

Most people using MariaDB today probably consider it is just legal fork of original MySQL and Percona probably some proprietary. Not that. Percona Server full GNU GPL.

Percona XtraDB is a storage engine both for the MariaDB and Percona Server databases, intended as a drop-in replacement to InnoDB. MariaDB onced used Percona’s XtraDB as the default storage engine as InnoDB. MariaDB from version 10.2, again InnoDB engine is the default engine. For InnoDB, with Percona we are getting XtraDB as default engine. MariaDB cherry-picked MySQL features, they does not guarantee any drop-in compatibility with original MySQL. WordPress tends to be heavily weighted toward read-only queries where InnoDB should give good benefit as it caches data pages as well as indexes. Improvements in XtraDB are designed to help as the number of Threads_running gets higher, or the buffer pool gets larger.

Most of the sysadmin issues with Percona (like currently Ubuntu 18.04 has problem with auto-restart, we pointed a fix in our installation guide) actually gets fixed following original MySQL or MariaDB. Percona of course has more tools for optimization. Newer Percona server usually enough tweaked to power smaller sized WordPress site. No extra tweak more than we do needed. Percona Server will offer minimum advantage out of improvements even to low traffic sites.

For us, Percona is easier to use Percona our tutorials and scripts. We will rather give the readers the options to decide whether after through research they need to use MariaDB. Percona claims that their MySQL server is better. We are talking about using dedicated servers.

Although MariaDB and Percona not hugely different up to medium sized sites, one must treat them as different. Switching may invite minor troubles at front-end.