MariaDB Names Mark Our Continued Differentiation

Posted on July 2, 2020 by

With the release of MariaDB Community Server 10.5, we continue what we started with our first divergence from MySQL, adding important features while maintaining key points of compatibility.

To reflect our differentiation from MySQL, MariaDB Community Server 10.5 includes more MariaDB-named executables. And reflecting the value we place on compatibility, we include symlinks for old binary names.

We started renaming executables to mariadb in MariaDB Server 10.4, using symlinks from the legacy mysql names to the new mariadb executable names. Now in MariaDB Server 10.5 the symlinks reverse direction, with MariaDB executables such as mariadb, mariadbd, and mariadbdump and symlinks for legacy MySQL equivalents  mysql, mysqld, and mysqldump. As we continue this transition to MariaDB-named executables, it becomes possible to run MariaDB and MySQL side-by-side without conflicts. See our documentation on MariaDB Community Server 10.5 for a full list of the executable name changes.

When we think about MariaDB’s differentiators from MySQL, we find a rich set of functionality to better serve the modern application developer, achieve scalability and cloud native operation in support of the enterprise use cases. A few examples include:

  • Pluggable storage engines to meet the demands of diverse workloads, including the ColumnStore columnar storage engine for analytics and HTAP which is now available to all with MariaDB Community Server 10.5
  • Temporal data tables including system-versioned, application-time period, and bitemporal (combining system-versioned and application-time period)
  • sql_mode=ORACLE compatibility for portions of Oracle PL/SQL
  • Replication GTID (global transaction ID) with domains
  • Re-architected the internals of InnoDB for improved performance and scalability
  • Cloud-native storage capabilities

With this change we are further emphasizing that we are an independent database and are paving our own way forward, while we might occasionally still port some feature or functionality from MySQL, 99% of all new development comes from the MariaDB team, and are unique and are new features. With this change we want to make it easier for customers and users to make the distinction between the two products.

Download MariaDB Community Server 10.5 (includes ColumnStore for analytics).

New features of MariaDB Community Server 10.5 with ColumnStore demo