MariaDB

MariaDB is an open-source relational database under GPLv2 with MySQL and Oracle compatibility, run self-managed or as the managed MariaDB Cloud service.

MariaDB keeps an application's data in SQL tables and stays close enough to MySQL and Oracle that teams can move applications without retraining or rewriting them. MariaDB plc builds the database and supports it from headquarters in Silicon Valley and Ireland. Community Server is the open-source edition, released under the GNU General Public License version 2. Enterprise Platform is the supported build a company runs on its own infrastructure, and MariaDB Cloud is the same engine operated as a managed service. Inside the server, the InnoDB engine handles ACID transactions with row-level locks. Tables can be partitioned, given full-text indexes and encrypted on disk, and schema changes run online while the table keeps taking writes. ColumnStore adds a columnar engine for analytical queries, and MariaDB Exa extends that to massively parallel analytics built on Exasol's technology. MaxScale sits in front of the servers as a proxy that splits reads from writes and promotes a replica when the primary goes down. Enterprise Manager watches the fleet, while native vector search, AI RAG, an MCP Server and the GridGain in-memory cache bring AI and distributed compute into the same platform. MariaDB suits developers and database teams running MySQL-compatible applications, and companies moving off legacy commercial databases. Enterprises that want vendor support, clustering and automated failover on hardware they control choose Enterprise Platform. Teams that would rather not operate servers choose MariaDB Cloud, which runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and offers serverless scaling on demand. Platform teams standardised on Kubernetes deploy it through the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator. Transactional systems are the main workload, and ColumnStore or Exa let the same data answer analytical queries without moving it to a separate analytics system. Teams adding AI features query vector data next to their relational rows and use AI RAG to ground model answers in their own records. On Azure, MariaDB Cloud can deploy into a customer's own account, so existing cloud credits and infrastructure controls still apply. High-availability designs pair the servers with MaxScale or synchronous clustering, so an application keeps running when one database server fails.