Catalogs in MariaDB

MariaDB Server is the open source database powering most of the internet. Many deployments of MariaDB are done as part of a shared hosting solution, where the underlying hardware is shared by many different tenants. To achieve scalability, hosting providers typically start a single MariaDB Server instance and impose artificial limitations to tenants, such as disallowing any new user creation, modifications, passwords, access control changes etc. The alternative of starting up dedicated database servers incurs a significant resource overhead, limiting the number of total tenants and implies wasted energy and compute power.

Catalogs is a feature built for MariaDB Server to eliminate the need for artificial restrictions, all while maintaining high scalability and user density. Catalogs introduce an extra separation on the SQL layer, allowing a user experience that is almost 100% identical to running a dedicated MariaDB Server instance, without the overhead of starting up multiple servers. With catalogs, hosting providers will be able to optimize hardware usage while their users will be able to modify their own dedicated system tables, without impacting other tenants.