The MySQL database application has a long history. It was first released in 1995 and quickly gained traction as a fast, efficient, affordable database management application.
When WordPress was launched in 2003, it chose MySQL to manage its database.
It is currently owned by Oracle Corporation. It is open-source software licensed under the GPL and is available free of charge.
When MySQL was acquired by Oracle in 2009, a community of developers created a fork of the software. They called this new open-source project MariaDB.
With MariaDB, they could continue working on the database independently of Oracle while Oracle oversaw the ongoing development of MySQL.
Since then, new features have been added to MariaDB that are not in MySQL, and the team has improved its performance. However, it remains completely compatible with MySQL.
We switched this blog to MariaDB in 2019 to take advantage of the performance benefits and speed up the WPBeginner website.