MariaDB

A community-developed fork of MySQL.

MariaDB began in 2009 as a community fork of MySQL, started by MySQL's original creator Monty Widenius after Sun's MySQL acquisition (and the subsequent Oracle acquisition of Sun) raised concerns about the project's future as free software. The fork preserved MySQL's wire protocol and most of its behaviour while opening governance to a broader community.

MariaDB aims to remain a drop-in replacement for MySQL while adding features such as additional storage engines (Aria, ColumnStore, S3-compatible engines, the document-store SQL engine), parallel replication, virtual columns, JSON support, and ACID-compliant default behaviour for newer versions. Most applications that work with MySQL work unchanged on MariaDB.

Most major Linux distributions now ship MariaDB as their default MySQL-compatible package: Debian, Ubuntu (since 22.04), Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch all default to MariaDB. The MariaDB Foundation governs the open-source project, while MariaDB Corporation (a separate commercial entity) sells support and the SkySQL hosted service. The licence is GPL-2.0 for the server.

License: GPL-2.0-only

Category: Data

Website: https://mariadb.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install mariadb-server
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install mariadb-server
Arch:          sudo pacman -S mariadb
macOS:         brew install mariadb

Authors

Monty Widenius (creator)
MariaDB Foundation and contributors

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