Performance

The biggest feature and therefore the biggest advantage of MariaDB is its speed and performance. When it comes to performing queries or replication, MariaDB is faster than MySQL. So if you need a high-performance relational database solution, MariaDB is a good choice. In addition, MariaDB also easily supports a high concurrent number of connections without much performance degradation. So if you have many data sources, this could be another reason to prefer MariaDB over MySQL.

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Conclusion

Is MariaDB really the better MySQL for many? Even if this question cannot be answered conclusively, the fact that many leading IT companies such as Google, Wikimedia, redhat, ubuntu, Mozilla, Suse or even XAMPP (Apache) have opted for MariaDB is certainly a clear indication.