This is the page for both MySQL and MariaDB. Here is a brief summary of the MySQL Wikipedia page:
MySQL is a is an open-source relational database originally developed by Michael Widenius and others over 30 years ago, and was overseen by MySQL AB. which included the InnoDB, which was originally developed by the Finnish company Innobase OY, which was acquired by Oracle in October 2005. After Innobase's acquisition, there was a "multi-year" extension of MySQL AB's licensing agreement. Then in January 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB, and then in April 2009, Oracle acquired Sun. In January of that year, Widenius had started a GPL-only fork of MySQL, called MariaDB, which is backed by the MariaDB foundation, and left Oracle the day of the acquisition, taking "a swath of MySQL developers with him".
Both MySQL and MariaDB offered 5.x releases, which were largely the same. But since then, they have been diverging. MySQL versions jumped to an 8.x release and since then a 9.x release, with LTS (Long Term Support versions) of 8.0 LTS (April 2018), 8.4 LTS (April 2024) and most recently 9.7 LTS (April 2026), with support lasting 8 years.
Meanwhile, MariaDB versions jumped to a 10.x versioning with 10.0 LTS in November 2012, and released 10.x LTS versions roughly every 18-24 months, with 6 year support. It has since moved to 11.x LTS releases, again with 6 year support, and has just started a every three month RR (Rolling Release) schedule, presumably with more LTS versions in the future. Currently supported LTS versions (again, per Wikipedia), are 10.6 LTS (Apr 2021), 10.11 LTS (Sep 2022), 11.4 LTS (December 2023) and 11.8 LTS (December 2024), while 12.3.2 (GA) was just released on 28 May 2026 (I write this on the 30th).
Both MySQL and MariaDB offer a "Community" version and a version with commercial support.
Additional resources:
In my previous article, I talked about why I am interested in Tuleap. But in this one, I am going to talk about my impressions of the software, in trying to set it up and get it running. And while not quite an article warranting a Core Dump category tag, I did realize that I needed a new one, as I have done a number of similar posts.
If you have looked around this site, or know me and have heard me discuss it, I have an honest to goodness Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. I am not talking about the rebuilt version called Rocky Linux, which is the successor to CentOS after Red Hat changed that distro from being just a rebuilt/relabeled version of the corresponding RHEL version to a stream version sitting somewhere behind Fedora and before RHEL.
I wanted to add an emoji to a comment I just made on my last post, and I wanted something more than the old-style :) emoticon which I have used for (mumble) years. A quick Google told me about the ckeditor_emoji module for Dupal, with a comment by Jeff Geerling of all people (A YouTuber I occasionally watch, who has contributed many Ansible modules I regularly use), to make sure that your Drupal database supports the "utf8mb4" encoding.
