MariaDB is the free (GPL) branch (actually more of a fork at this point) created by Monty, the primary original author of MySQL.

Is anyone actually using MariaDB in production at a reasonable scale? Our DBAs tried to convince us to switch from MySQL to Maria a few months ago. All of the devs on my team looked around and couldn't find any testimonials, use-cases or benchmarks that weren't done by someone on the Maria dev team. I realize Monty is behind it but I don't really feel like being an early adopter based on fear that some day Oracle might do something bad with MySQL.

I use MariaDB on all of my websites these days, the largest of which tops out at around 5K queries a second. The biggest draw for me was the XtraDB engine (which is also found in Percona Server) which is a replacement for InnoDB. XtraDB performs much better on SSDs and I was able to get over 50% performance gains on some queries with the default settings. This may or may not be applicable to your specific environment, but it is a drop-in replacement so it's very easy to just install it on a test box and stress test it with your current code.

To be clear, XtraDB is solely developed by Percona. MariaDB has nicely included it, not the other way around.

I was just pointing out that Percona Server is another MySQL drop-in replacement since the commenter seems to be asking about an enterprise environment which Percona Server is targeted more towards than MariaDB. You're right I should have clarified that XtraDB is a product of Percona.

http://drupal.org/node/861192 comment #4 - used for Drupal's test cluster

http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-case-studies/ (including Limelight networks)

Switching in early 2010 would have made you an early adopter.

My sense is that most sites use Percona Server instead of MariaDB, because Percona and xtradb (mods to innodb) have been around longer, and those changes are generally a subset of the changes MariaDB incorporates.

I've been using it in production as the primary datastore on a news website with fairly high traffic (10 million+ monthly uniques, 1000s of queries per second). Have not encountered any issues since switching to MariaDB over a year ago. Monty's organization places a high value on well tested and stable releases.

Not an expert here: Will all those PHP projects in the wild work with MariaDB? Everytime a friend needs a blog or wiki I have to make sure MySQL is installed because it seems few people who make PHP projects allow other backends.

I'd love to apt-get purge mysql-server from my servers.

or YourSQL