Open Dental Forum

Is there any reason why this won't work?

There could be many reasons it won't work, or you could get lucky and it might work flawlessly. We (Open Dental) will not support your database problems / issues for we are not trained in MariaDB so be willing to embark on having a good IT team to help out when unexpected issues arise or to solve them yourself. We can and will give you our best guesses as to what might solve the issue if we recognize it. E.g. "We expect this to happen with MySQL so maybe find the equivalent for MariaDB".

I would recommend against it if you do not have a full time staff dedicated to monitoring your server needs.

Just wondering...

Has the position on MariaDB changed in the last 5,5 years within Open Dental ?
As MariaDB is easily available on Synology NAS machines it is a very tempting alternative to a Windows server running a MySQL server.

Regards, Daniel

It's complicated. We're currently lukewarm about MariaDB. We were more enthusiastic last year, but then our hopes were tempered a bit. We are continuing to research it. The setbacks we've had have been with very large customers pushing it hard. Some queries are inexplicably slower than MySQL. For the most part, they are equivalent, but there are some edge case issues.

I've been waiting for this for the same reason as DanTheMan. These synology boxes are incredibly reliable. For the offices I'm already using them for the images, the apteryx share, and as the AD domain controller, and as soon as it's supported I'd like to permanently run the OD database on the mariadb on it too and put the windows server to rest.

My database isn't huge (~1GB), but everything I've tested in opendental on it actually seems faster even on this little DS720+.

Dr. Sparks, do you remember off hand what queries/operations seemed problematic so I can check them?

FYI I'm running mariadb 10.3.21.

Hi,
Any reason why a solo practitioner in a low volume office couldn’t use a nice Synology DSM to run MariaDB and the other apps you suggested and just have OD on a workstation?
Don’t know if I would need to run AD since I won’t need group policies but then I don’t know much about windows server.
Solution seems elegant and since even the mid range Synology NAS have x2 NICs which you can bond at your switch.
Would also ease a disaster recovery plan having a replica unit running on or off site.
Anybody doing this in a production environment?
Thanks