Thanks @amine, a lot of your exploratory work reported here. It helped me a lot getting MariaDB up and running for context-sensitive tests with mariaDB4j 
@dkayiwa I have been doing that in the context of the upcoming Iniz Validator that will allow to make dry runs on OpenMRS configs as a standalone fatjar tool. For this I needed MariaDB rather than H2 to be able to preload the official CIEL SQL dump before replaying the config.
Long story short, all works well but I found that BaseContextSensitiveTest could be more helpful by letting a couple of methods be (non-final) protected (rather than currently private), namely: