What is MariaDB? If you have bought this book, you probably already know; anyway, a quick reminder and a short introduction helps us to understand certain things.

MariaDB is a fork (drop-in replacement) of MySQL. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Then, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 with MySQL included.

For several reasons, Michael Monty Widenius (the founder of MySQL) decided to fork MySQL and create a company for it called Monty Program AB. Thus, MariaDB (Maria is the name of the second daughter of Michael Monty Widenius) was born.

In December 2012, the MariaDB foundation was created to avoid any company acquisition like what had happened in the past for MySQL.

SkySQL is a company comprising of ex-MySQL executives and investors who deliver services around MySQL/MariaDB. In April 2013, there was a merger between SkySQL and Monty Program AB. For a company that may have wanted to switch to MariaDB without support, it was problematic. However, since the merger, it has been possible.

MariaDB has new interesting features: better testing, performance improvements, and bug fixes that are unfortunately not available in MySQL. For example, some optimizations come from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.