Automating Hermitage to see how transactions differ in MySQL and MariaDB

This article introduces Monastery, an open-source tool for systematically testing transaction isolation level differences between MySQL and MariaDB by automating the Hermitage framework—revealing how different databases handle concurrent transaction anomalies like dirty reads and dirty writes. For IT organizations, understanding these database-specific isolation behaviors is critical for preventing data consistency issues in production systems, particularly when evaluating or migrating between MySQL and MariaDB variants. The findings highlight that despite SQL standards, database implementations diverge significantly in their transaction handling, which directly impacts application reliability and data integrity across different deployment scenarios.