MariaDB

MariaDB is an open-source relational database created in 2009 by Michael Widenius, the original MySQL developer, as a community-developed fork after Oracle acquired MySQL, designed as a drop-in replacement maintaining full compatibility with MySQL protocols, clients, and tools while adding enhanced features and new storage engines. Now powering applications at Google, Wikipedia, and ServiceNow with over twelve million instances deployed globally. The MySQL compatibility ensures existing applications, connectors, and tools work without modification, enabling seamless migration through simple package replacement. The storage engine architecture provides InnoDB as the default transactional engine, MyISAM for legacy compatibility, Aria for crash-safe tables, ColumnStore for analytical workloads, and RocksDB for write-optimized scenarios. The performance improvements over MySQL include optimized query execution, faster connection handling, and thread pooling. The SQL extensions include RETURNING clause, INTERSECT and EXCEPT operations, system-versioned tables for temporal data, and CHECK constraints. The Galera cluster provides multi-master synchronous replication. The MaxScale proxy enables query routing and load balancing. Designed for database administrators and backend developers.