About MariaDB
Monty Program has What is MariaDB 5.5? and MariaDB vs. MySQL whitepapers available for download.
MariaDB is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL and is available under the terms of the GPL v2 license. It's developed by the MariaDB community with the MariaDB Foundation as its main steward.
Security
Security is very important in today's world and is a particular focus for the MariaDB developers. The project maintains its own set security patches on top of MySQL's. For each MariaDB release the developers also merge in all of MySQL's security patches and enhance them if necessary. When critical security issues are discovered the developers immediately prepare and distribute a new release of MariaDB to get the fix out as quickly as possible.
Many of the security issues found in MySQL and MariaDB have been found and reported by the MariaDB team. The MariaDB team works closely with http://cve.mitre.org/ to ensure all security issues are promptly reported and explained in sufficient detail. The security details are typically released after fixed MariaDB and MySQL versions have been published.
Compatibility
MariaDB is kept up to date with the latest MySQL release from the same branch and in most respects MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL. All commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! Additionally, MariaDB has many nice new features that you can take advantage of.
See the MariaDB FAQ for more information.
Current Versions & Release Schedule
- The current stable MariaDB release is MariaDB 5.5.
- The development release is MariaDB 10.0.
- The previous stable release is MariaDB 5.3.
Current and Development versions of MariaDB (and many previous versions) can be downloaded from http://downloads.mariadb.org
We do updates to active releases about once a month. Major releases are made in about 9 month intervals. For 10.x releases this is likely to be done in 6 months intervals.
The road map on http://mariadb.org/jira will let you know when to expect the next release of MariaDB. It is, of course, only an estimate, but the developers try to stick to it whenever possible.
Support
MariaDB and MySQL are well supported by the MariaDB community. Full 24x7, consulting, bug-fix, and other levels of support for MariaDB and MySQL are available from several companies including Monty Program Ab and SkySQL.