I haven't worked with MariaDB.  In my session for Elevate I used SQL Server Express, both for my local project and in AWS.

My initial impression is that you would use an ODBC driver for it ( such as https://mariadb.com/kb/en/about-mariadb-connector-odbc/ ) just as you would for MySQL (which MariaDB is derived from).

For what it's worth though, my experience with using MySQL/MariaDB has always been painful, particular if you use a storage engine that doesn't support transactions.  I would opt for just about any of the other database options that AWS supports such as PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server before going with MySQL or MariaDB.  The Amazon Aurora database is MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible and I'd probably even look at that as well.  That's just based on prior painful experience on my part, your mileage may vary.

Note that if you're looking at an AWS database to save licensing costs, only DynamoDB is free.  And because that one is NoSQL, you'd have to get a third party ODBC driver (usually at some cost) in order to talk to it from PowerBuilder.

Thanks Bruce!

It's actually not a cost issue, but a central DB issue.  My client has staff all over the country that need to access the application and I'm open to whatever database works best.  For SQL Server, would you use the native driver or continue to use ODBC. 

Tim 

Running client/server this way is probably going to perform bad, be unstable, and have security issues.  The recommended way is to use PowerServer 2021 if you want to deploy to the cloud, or at least use VDI in the cloud.

You can quickly experience what an app deployed by PowerServer is like running one of the demo apps.

As far as database, out of the commercial ones SQL Server is the most popular and out of open-source ones PostgreSQL.  Both of these are officially supported for client/server or PowerServer projects.