It’s an open source venture backed by $35M from FirstMark Capital, Spark Capital, and GV (Google Ventures). It’s a drop-in replacement for MySQL with an extension architecture. See their native UUID extension with efficient 16-byte storage as an example.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see multiple MySQL forks emerge in 2026, now that more people are realizing how bad Oracle has been as an open source project steward for MySQL.
In my mind when I see MySQL somewhere it actually means MariaDB. It’s also the default in Debian. Probably in other distributions as well. Or maybe Percona.
Agree. Although Mariadb has drifted significantly (and with very good reason) in terms code, features and SQL - I still mentally parse “Mysql” as “MariaDb”. It’s one of the best forks I’ve ever encountered in all my time using foss. I currently maintain around 80 MariaDb servers and have remarkably few problems.
Much as I like to see variety in software, I do kind of wish more recognition of MariaDb was given, and more support.