The 'MySQL' name is trademarked by Oracle, and they have chosen to keep that trademark to themselves. The name MySQL (just like the MyISAM storage engine) comes from Monty's first daughter My. The first part of 'MySQL' is pronounced like the English adjective, even if this doesn't match the correct pronunciation of the Finnish name.

MariaDB continues this tradition by being named after his younger daughter, Maria.

The name Maria was initially given to a storage engine. After MariaDB was started, to avoid confusion, it was renamed to Aria. The new name was decided as a result of a contest.

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To provide a community developed, stable, and always Free DBMS that is, on the user level, broadly compatible with MySQL.

We strive for interoperability with both our own, and our upstream, communities.

Until , MariaDB was kept up to date with the latest MySQL release from the same branch. For example was up to date with MySQL 5.1.47, and so on.

We did a merge from the main MySQL branch for every new MySQL release or when there was some critical bugfix applied to the main branch.

Since , MariaDB includes backported features from MySQL as well as entirely new features not found anywhere else, but does not necessarily include all MySQL features.

We strive to keep our main trees as free from bugs as possible. It should be reasonably safe to pull from our trees at any time.

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Question: When I use the mysql client as in mysql -u root -p -h <host>, does the password-enter prompt popup before or after the client has established a connection with the server?

Answer: Before the client has established a connection to the server.

How do we derive the answer?

lovegood:~ byte$ mysql -uroot -p -hlocalhost
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 1
Server version: 5.2.8-MariaDB Source distribution

This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Bye
lovegood:~ byte$ mysql.server stop
Shutting down MySQL
. SUCCESS! 
lovegood:~ byte$ mysql -uroot -p -hlocalhost
Enter password: 
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)

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