MariaDB is a relational database. It is a fork – that means it is a successor version of MySQL developed by community. This branch was created primarily to maintain the GNU GPL free open source software licence. The initiative which stood behind the creation of this branch came from original MySQL developers. They feared for a future heading of this software after it had been bought by Oracle. Contributors involved in the development have to share their copyright with MariaDB Foundation.
MariaDB is a relational database. It is a fork – that means it is a successor version of MySQL developed by community. This branch was created primarily to maintain the GNU GPL free open source software licence. The initiative which stood behind the creation of this branch came from original MySQL developers. They feared for a future heading of this software after it had been bought by Oracle. Contributors involved in the development have to share their copyright with MariaDB Foundation.
MariaDB’s chief developer is Michael “Monty” Widenius. He was the original founder of MySQL and Monty Program AB. It sold its MySQL AB to Sun Microsystems for one billion dollars. Fork is named after his younger daughter. MariaDB is written in C, C++, Bash and Perl.
Many well-known companies, including Service Now, DBS Bank, Google, Mozilla or Wikimedia Foundation have chosen MariaDB for their purposes.
MariaDB API and protocols are designed to be compatible with those used by MySQL. At the same time, selected features supporting native operations are added. All connectors, libraries and applications cooperating with MySQL should also work for MariaDB.
Regarding the fact, that MariaDB is MySQL fork, database structure and indexes match MySQL. This allows switching between MySQL and MariaDB without a need to change applications because there is no need to change data and their structures.
This means that:
Even command line tools are similar.
In December 2012, Michael Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson announced the creation of a foundation that would supervise MariaDB development.