The MySQL Fork that Google has Adopted

MariaDB is a community developed fork of MySQL, which has overtaken MySQL. That many leading corporations in the cyber environment, including Google, have migrated to MariaDB speaks for its importance as a player in the database firmament.

MariaDB is a high performance, open source database that helps the world's busiest websites deliver more content, faster. It has been created by the developers of MySQL with the help of the FOSS community and is a fork of MySQL. It offers various features and enhancements like alternate storage engines, server optimisations and patches.

The lead developer of MariaDB is Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, who is also the founder of MySQL and Monty Program AB.

No single person or company nurtures MariaDB/MySQL development. The guardian of the MariaDB community, the MariaDB Foundation, drives it. It states that it has the trademark of the MariaDB server and owns mariadb.org, which ensures that the official MariaDB development tree is always open to the developer community. The MariaDB Foundation assures the community that all the patches, as well as MySQL source code, are merged into MariaDB. The Foundation also provides a lot of documentation. MariaDB is a registered trademark of SkySQL Corporation and is used by the MariaDB Foundation with permission. It is a good choice for database professionals looking for the best and most robust SQL server.

History

In 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for US$ 1 billion. But the original developer, Monty Widenius, was quite disappointed with the way things were run at Sun and founded his own new company and his own fork of MySQL - MariaDB. It is named after Monty's younger daughter, Maria. Later, when Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun, most of the MySQL developers jumped to its forks: MariaDB and Drizzle.

MariaDB version numbers follow MySQL numbers till 5.5. Thus, all the features in MySQL are available in MariaDB. After MariaDB 5.5, its developers started a new branch numbered MariaDB 10.0, which is the development version of MariaDB. This was done to make it clear that MariaDB 10.0 will not import all the features from MySQL 5.6. Also, at times, some of these features do not seem to be solid enough for MariaDB’s standards. Since new specific features have been developed in MariaDB, the team decided to go for a major version number. The currently used version, MariaDB 10.0, is built on the MariaDB 5.5 series and has back ported features from MySQL 5.6 along with entirely new developments.