By Jonathan Bowen

Welcome to the second article of a three part series on MariaDB vs. MySQL.  In the first part I wrote about how MySQL has fared under Oracle ownership.  We found that it is not particularly seeming to suffer, but then again, MySQL is subject to the profit and loss whim of Oracle, and could disappear suddenly.  In this article, I will discuss the advent of MariaDB upon the scene, and give a brief history.  In the third installment, I plan on comparing and contrasting MariaDB and MySQL.

The history of MariaDB begins not with Oracle, but with Sun’s acquisition of MySQL in 2008.  After Sun purchased it, there were several changes to the development process.   New versions were not released as often and there was less contribution from the community.  It was more or less at this time that Brian Aker forked MySQL into the Drizzle project.  It seems, though, that Drizzle was never intended to replace the full MySQL server, but was targeted to a “limited but important market”,  according to MySQL and MariaDB creator Monty Widenius.

In 2009, Monty Widenius left the company and started MariaDB, which is a new fork of MySQL.  As opposed to Drizzle, MariaDB IS intended as a replacement for the full MySQL server.  When Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, it seems that most of the MySQL developers left and joined either Drizzle or MariaDB.   Both forks continue to thrive as truly Open Source endeavors with many contributions and contributors.

Now that we know where MariaDB came from and why, we need to examine MySQL and MariaDB and see the strengths and weaknesses of both DB systems.  My next installment will compare and contrast MySQL and MariaDB.

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