MariaDB Server
An open-source relational database forked from MySQL by its original developers, maintained by the MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB plc, with MySQL wire-protocol compatibility, pluggable storage engines, and built-in Galera clustering.
MariaDB Server began as a fork of MySQL led by the original MySQL developers and has grown into its own database while maintaining a high degree of MySQL wire-protocol and syntax compatibility, making it a straightforward migration target for existing MySQL deployments. It ships pluggable storage engines — InnoDB (the transactional default), Aria, MyRocks, the ColumnStore analytical engine, the Spider sharding engine, and S3 for archival — alongside a native VECTOR type with HNSW approximate-nearest-neighbour indexing since 11.8, common table expressions, window functions, system-versioned (temporal) tables, and an Oracle SQL compatibility mode with PL/SQL-style stored routines.
Replication options range from asynchronous and semi-synchronous to parallel replication with global transaction IDs, alongside Galera synchronous multi-primary clustering. It’s released under GPLv2, follows a yearly long-term-support release model (three years of maintenance) alongside quarterly rolling releases, and is distributed as native packages for major platforms as well as official Docker images.
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