MariaDB
GPL-only MySQL fork under a foundation, with Galera clustering and native vectors.
Logo assets
MariaDB brand colours
Extracted from the artwork and ranked by how much of the mark each covers — not from a brand book, so treat them as observed rather than official.
What MariaDB is
MariaDB was forked from MySQL 5.1 by its original authors after Oracle acquired Sun, and is stewarded by the MariaDB Foundation with MariaDB plc selling support. It stays broadly wire- and dialect-compatible while diverging where it wants to: bundled Galera synchronous clustering, pluggable storage engines such as ColumnStore and Spider, and native vector search shipped in the community server ahead of MySQL.
Recent changes
- 2025-06-04MariaDB 11.8 LTS ships vector search in the community server
A VECTOR column type with an approximate nearest-neighbour index reaches GA in a mainstream open-source relational engine, without an enterprise tier. It landed ahead of MySQL, whose 9.x VECTOR type still leans on HeatWave for approximate indexing, and it narrows one of pgvector's few remaining structural advantages.