MariaDB

MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of MySQL created by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original creator of MySQL. After Oracle acquired MySQL through the Sun Microsystems purchase, MariaDB was forked to ensure the database remained truly open source and community-driven.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL in most scenarios. It uses the same client libraries, protocols, and SQL syntax, so applications designed for MySQL typically work with MariaDB without modification. Many Linux distributions and hosting control panels have switched their default database server from MySQL to MariaDB.

Performance improvements over MySQL include the Aria storage engine (crash-safe replacement for MyISAM), thread pool for better handling of many concurrent connections, query optimizer enhancements, and the ColumnStore engine for analytical workloads. MariaDB also supports additional storage engines like Spider (for sharding), Connect (for accessing external data), and Mroonga (full-text search).

For hosting providers, MariaDB offers better performance under the concurrent connection loads typical of shared hosting. The thread pool is particularly valuable when hundreds of hosting accounts hit the database server simultaneously. Memory usage is generally more efficient than MySQL at scale.

cPanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin all support MariaDB, with cPanel offering it as an alternative to MySQL through EasyApache. Most hosting companies have migrated to MariaDB or offer it as the default, especially since Red Hat, Debian, and other major distributions made it their standard MySQL replacement.