Preface

Databases are all around us. Almost every website we visit and nearly every store we shop at has a database (or several) working quietly behind the scenes. The same goes for banks, hospitals, government agencies, theaters, doctors, hospitals, amusement parks, and police departments. All use databases to store, sort, and analyze their own particular information.

This information comes in many forms and can be anything that can be stored electronically inside a computer. This includes books, catalogs, addresses, names, dates, finances, pictures, money, passwords, documents, preferences, tweets, posts, likes, blogs, articles, and much more. Databases are one of the foundational pillars of the modern electronic world.

Your posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter are stored in a database. All your financial information in your bank is stored in a database. Your purchase history at your favorite online retailer is too. How about your progress in your favorite online game? You guessed it. What about the record of when you last paid your water bill? That too! You just can't get away from databases. They are, quite literally, everywhere.

There is a new database that has caught the attention of the database community over the past few years like few others have. First released in 2009, its name is MariaDB—named after the youngest daughter of its creator, Michael "Monty" Widenius.

MariaDB may be younger than the databases it is often compared with, but it has a stellar parentage. It's a next-generation evolution of the popular MySQL database, also created by Monty (you may have heard of it, but don't worry if you haven't).

MariaDB is open source. This means that the source code is freely downloadable and is governed by a license that helps ensure the source code stays free and open to all. The MariaDB developers have also kindly provided installers for various operating systems.

Since its first release, MariaDB has gained a large, loyal following faster than almost any other database. Today, it powers tens of thousands of websites, big and small, and is the database of choice for many companies in a wide variety of industries around the world with hundreds of thousands of users.

The great news is that we can install and use it ourselves, right now, on our personal laptop and desktop computers. For all of its power—and MariaDB is a very powerful and capable database, make no mistake—it is very easy to install and use.

This book provides an introduction to MariaDB that is enough to get us started. Don't worry if you've never used a database before - this book covers everything you need to know, and before you know it, you'll be on your way to becoming an expert database administrator (DBA). But even if you never move beyond just tinkering or playing around with MariaDB, you'll learn about one of the fundamental technologies of our times.

Not a bad accomplishment over a weekend or two.