MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the original developers of MySQL, who forked it due to concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009.
MariaDB is intended to maintain high compatibility with MySQL, with exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands, allowing it in many cases to function as drop-in replacement for MySQL. However, new features are diverging. It includes new storage engines like Aria, ColumnStore, and MyRocks.
Its lead developer/CTO is Michael "Monty" Widenius, one of the founders of MySQL AB and the founder of Monty Program AB. On 16 January 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion. The acquisition completed on 26 February 2008. Sun was then bought the following year by Oracle Corporation. MariaDB is named after Widenius' younger daughter, Maria. (MySQL is named after his other daughter, My.)
Features
MariaDB Server
Licensing
The MariaDB Foundation mentions:MariaDB Server will remain Free and Open Source Software licensed under GPLv2, independent of any commercial entities.
Versioning
MariaDB version numbers follow MySQL's numbering scheme up to version 5.5. Thus, MariaDB 5.5 offers all of the MySQL 5.5 features. There exists a gap in MySQL versions between 5.1 and 5.5, while MariaDB issued 5.2 and 5.3 point releases.
Since specific new features have been developed in MariaDB, the developers decided that a major version number change was necessary.
Third-party software
MariaDB's API and protocol are compatible with those used by MySQL, plus some features to support native non-blocking operations and progress reporting. This means that all connectors, libraries and applications which work with MySQL should also work on MariaDB—whether or not they support its native features. On this basis, Fedora developers replaced MySQL with MariaDB in Fedora 19, out of concerns that Oracle was making MySQL a more closed software project. OpenBSD likewise in April 2013 dropped MySQL for MariaDB 5.5.
However, for recent MySQL features, MariaDB either has no equivalent yet (like geographic function) or deliberately chose not to be 100% compatible (like GTID, JSON). The list of incompatibilities grows longer with each version.
Prominent users
MariaDB is used at ServiceNow, DBS Bank, Google, Mozilla, and, since 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation.
Several Linux distributions and BSD operating systems include MariaDB. Some default to MariaDB, such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Debian (from Debian 9), Fedora (from Fedora 19), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (from RHEL 7 in June 2014), CentOS (from CentOS 7), Mageia (from Mageia 2), openSUSE (from openSUSE 12.3 Dartmouth), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (from SLES 12), Slackware Linux (from Slackware 14.1), OpenBSD (from 5.7), and FreeBSD.
MariaDB Foundation
The MariaDB Foundation was founded in 2012 to oversee the development of MariaDB. The current CEO of the MariaDB Foundation is Kaj Arnö since February 2019.
Notable sponsors of MariaDB Foundation
The most notable sponsors of MariaDB Foundation are Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Microsoft, MariaDB Corporation Ab, ServiceNow, Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, IBM, DBS Bank, and Amazon.
The Foundation also works with technology partners, e.g. Google tasked one of its engineers to work at the MariaDB Foundation in 2013.
History of MariaDB Foundation
In December 2012 Michael Widenius, David Axmark, and Allan Larsson announced the formation of a foundation that would oversee the development of MariaDB.
At the time of founding in 2013 the Foundation wished to create a governance model similar to that used by the Eclipse Foundation. The Board appointed the Eclipse Foundation's Executive Director Mike Milinkovich as an advisor to lead the transition.