I've done this 1000 times on debian 8 but with no success since I tried on debian 9.
I would like to change the default datadir for mariadb, here is the process from a virgin debian 9 VM:
apt-get update && apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client
service mysql stop
rsync -av /var/lib/mysql /home/
vi /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
grep -r datadir /etc/mysql/
/etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf:datadir = /home/mysql
[11:29:32]root@deb9: ~ # ls -la /home/mysql/
drwxr-xr-x 4 mysql mysql 4096 Sep 7 11:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 7 11:25 ..
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 16384 Sep 7 11:25 aria_log.00000001
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 52 Sep 7 11:25 aria_log_control
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 7 11:25 debian-10.1.flag
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 12582912 Sep 7 11:25 ibdata1
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 50331648 Sep 7 11:25 ib_logfile0
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 50331648 Sep 7 11:25 ib_logfile1
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 0 Sep 7 11:25 multi-master.info
drwx------ 2 mysql root 4096 Sep 7 11:25 mysql
drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4096 Sep 7 11:25 performance_schema
service mysql start
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian systemd[1]: Starting MariaDB database server...
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian mysqld[15106]: 2017-09-07 11:27:44 140699007124032 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld (mysqld 10.1.26-MariaDB-0+deb9u1) starting as process 15106 ...
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian mysqld[15106]: 2017-09-07 11:27:44 140699007124032 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/mysql/deb9.lower-test
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian mysqld[15106]: #007/usr/sbin/mysqld: Can't change dir to '/home/mysql/' (Errcode: 13 "Permission denied")
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian mysqld[15106]: 2017-09-07 11:27:44 140699007124032 [ERROR] Aborting
Sep 7 09:27:44 debian systemd[1]: mariadb.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
As you may see, the error is Permission denied some threads talks about app armor but this one is not running on processlist and I didn't touch anything about it.
grep -r maria /etc/apparmor
grep -r mysql /etc/apparmor
returns nothing.
I don't use SELINUX either ...
Thanks for your help.