Say the Name: MariaDB, MySQL, and the Ecosystem We Share

Names are important.

They help us identify people, projects, products, pets, database servers, and occasionally the correct bug tracker.

This may sound obvious, but the database world has spent more than fifteen years proving that it is not.

MySQL and MariaDB share a substantial amount of history, syntax, tooling, knowledge, applications, and community. They also have similar command names, compatible protocols, familiar configuration variables, and many users who simply say “MySQL” when they actually mean:

Some database server that speaks the MySQL protocol and probably has an executable named mysqld.

And most of the time, everybody understands.

Improving MariaDB support in open source projects

As part of MariaDB’s efforts in Adoption, we have been working on support of MariaDB in open source projects. 

The open source projects we have been looking at range from well known, ready to use projects like WordPress or MediaWiki (that Wikipedia runs on), to under-the-hood solutions like ORMs that connect software with databases for countless other open source and private projects.

MariaDB is the de facto standard that many projects and users are running. As MariaDB diverges, matures and develops on its own path from MySQL, especially in later versions, it’s not enough to shrug off compatibility questions with “MariaDB is a drop-in MySQL replacement – everybody knows that”.

MariaDB & Ecosystem Fragmentation

We hear you, Kristian Köhntopp! Thank you  for taking the time to articulate what many others are probably thinking.

For those of you to whom this sounds cryptic, let me share how I interpreted Kristian Köhntopp’s blog MySQL: Ecosystem fragmentation (https://blog.koehntopp.info/2020/10/28/
mysql-ecosystem-fragmentation.html
), published last week:

Kristian noted that the question “Which version of MySQL do you run on?” for a long time hasn’t been merely answered by a simple version number, since there are reasons to perceive MariaDB and Aurora to be “variations to the same theme”.