[Milhouse]

Am I right in understanding that Kodi should play nicely with MariaDB and that using it might be a possible workaround? I'd had problems with it before: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=318705

Kodi should in theory play nicely with MariaDB, but there's no absolute guarantees as for the time being the only two database backends that are "certified" are SQLite and MySQL. Kodi may work with MariaDB, but only so long as MariaDB remains compatible with MySQL.

I'm aware of your thread, but so far the behaviour you have observed isn't reproducible. We have done internal testing against MySQL and MariaDB and with/without derived_merge=off both backends return results in a similar time 0.001s (ie. basically immeasurable).

By all means try MariaDB instead. Kodi may gain official MariaDB support if PR13318 is merged.

I would also suggest testing with LibreELEC from a USB thumb drive to test your backend server, just in case there's a problem with your docker container.