MariaDB Database Server

MariaDB is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that serves as a community-developed, commercially-supported fork of MySQL. Created by Michael 'Monty' Widenius (the original creator of MySQL) in 2009 following MySQL's acquisition by Sun Microsystems (later Oracle), MariaDB is developed by the MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB Corporation, and is designed as a drop-in replacement for MySQL with enhanced features, performance improvements, and a commitment to remaining open source. Key features: MySQL compatibility: MariaDB maintains high compatibility with MySQL, supporting the same SQL dialect, client/server protocol, connectors, and file formats for most use cases. Applications written for MySQL can typically switch to MariaDB without code changes. Storage engines: MariaDB includes all standard MySQL storage engines (InnoDB as the default ACID transactional engine, MyISAM, MEMORY, CSV, ARCHIVE) plus additional engines developed by the MariaDB team: Aria (crash-safe MyISAM replacement), ColumnStore (columnar storage for analytics), Spider (sharding engine for transparent distributed queries), and RocksDB (via MyRocks for write-optimized workloads). Performance: MariaDB includes numerous query optimizer improvements, faster connection handling, thread pool (reduces context switching under high concurrency), and faster checkpointing. Extensions: new SQL features not in MySQL including sequences (CREATE SEQUENCE), EXECUTE IMMEDIATE for dynamic SQL, system-versioned tables (temporal data tracking all changes over time), RETURNING clause for DELETE and UPDATE (return affected rows), and INTERSECT/EXCEPT set operations. Galera Cluster: synchronous multi-master cluster for high availability and conflict-free writes. MaxScale: a database proxy providing query routing, load balancing, read/write splitting, and automatic failover. Security: enhanced role-based access control, password validation plugins. C/C++ codebase. Cross-platform. GPLv2.