No, MariaDB is completely independent of MySQL, and has been so for over a decade. It has its own future, its own roadmap, its own trademark, its own development team.
Combining the unpleasant truth with the pleasant one, there isn’t going to be a satisfactory answer, if the requirement is to use a product named MySQL that is compatible with MySQL 8.0 and being actively maintained. If the trademark requirement is dropped, long-term MySQL 8.0 compatibility is guaranteed in MariaDB 11.8 onwards.
The crème de la crème of the MySQL ecosystem met in Brussels around FOSDEM, less than a month ago. I wasn’t present for the MySQL days on Thursday and Friday prior to FOSDEM, but joined the Friday dinner. The time until late Monday afternoon was marked by worries about Oracle’s ability and interest to further develop MySQL, frustration that MySQL is wasting its head start and technical advantages over PostgreSQL, and initiatives to make MySQL live long and prosper, albeit on life support.
To the worried MySQL community members
The practical choice is not between loyalty and independence. It is between fragmentation and consolidation.
Now comes the “yes” answer to the question whether MariaDB is part of the MySQL ecosystem. Yes, MariaDB is part of the ecosystem around MySQL. Yes, more or less all the advantages of using MySQL are retained when you upgrade to MariaDB: performance, HA, ease of use, ease of maintenance. Your skill set is compatible. The migration isn’t much of a migration at all.
When people hear that MariaDB and MySQL share roots, it is tempting to think of them as being in the same “family” — and therefore on a similar trajectory.
This is not cognitive dissonance to be resolved. It is a reality to be understood.
“So which one is it — is MariaDB its own database, or is it a MySQL fork?”
The honest answer is less tidy — but far more useful: both.
Why MariaDB is both its own database — and the natural continuation of MySQL
MariaDB is its own product, with its own trademark, development team, governance, roadmap, and innovation. At the same time, it is deliberately MySQL-compatible — not by accident, not as a temporary bridge, but as a long-term commitment to users who value continuity over disruption.
Applications, teams, skills, investments, and use cases — all of it remains viable within the MariaDB part of the MySQL ecosystem.
My plea: Stop framing the future as “MySQL versus MariaDB.”
The worries in Brussels
The work that would justify such an effort — governance, openness, compatibility, long-term stewardship — is already being done, in public, at scale, in MariaDB.
But isn’t MariaDB “MySQL done right”?
Stop treating MariaDB as external to the MySQL community.
In German, there is a word for this kind of answer: Jein — yes and no.
The same roots or the same family?
Now comes the “no” answer to the question whether MariaDB is a variety of MySQL. No, MariaDB isn’t just named differently and doesn’t just have a strong development team of its own – those are just the requirements of establishing a product with differentiation. It already has fifteen years of track record in innovation on top of MySQL.
It hardly surprises anyone that our own claim is for MariaDB to be the future of MySQL. But now this is being increasingly articulated also by the community – in Reddit, and in the Marriott meeting rooms in Brussels.
As a concrete illustration of this continuity, let us look at a drastic example: On Monday 2 February 2026, lefred (Frédéric Descamps) was the last person standing in the Brussels Marriott room to defend the Oracle MySQL fort. Two weeks later, he rebooted himself as MariaDB Community Advocate at MariaDB Foundation. He hit the ground running, writing a highly technical blog about MariaDB’s plug-in architecture. That would hardly have been possible, if it weren’t for an, ahemm, fairly high level of compatibility between MySQL and MariaDB.
It is usually asked with the expectation that there must be a single, clean answer. Preferably a binary one.
- MariaDB shares roots with MySQL, but follows a fundamentally different philosophy from Oracle MySQL — openness, governance, and community agency are not side effects but design goals.
- MySQL was the necessary learning experience — MariaDB exists because we now know how to do this better the second time around.
- Now, we are not MySQL – we are MariaDB. We honour the MySQL past without being bound by it — continuity for users, freedom for the future.
That is a pipe dream. I strongly encourage you to read Monty says: The concepts of forking, Monty’s insightful piece on the types of fork out there. The short of it: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot fork MySQL without a new trademark and a strong development team. Establishing a new trademark and a new core database development team is very demanding: In skill, in credibility, in time, in capital. Take it from someone who has done it: MariaDB. It hasn’t been easy.
The desire for MySQL 8.0 to live forever
We are in a situation with a great product (MySQL) with a huge user base (the MySQL ecosystem) and unique technical properties (performance, HA, ease of use, ease of maintenance) has been de-facto stopped in its development, through letting the core team go and reallocating the rest towards closed-source and cloud development. That’s irreversible. Regretting the decisions made isn’t taking Oracle anywhere.
The worry about Oracle’s capability to deliver
In short, this has resulted in three key innovations, all on top of MySQL:
The desire for a tracking fork
This is written for those in the MySQL community who are asking what comes next.
The worry around Oracle’s stewardship of MySQL is not yet articulated into any canonical form. The most precise worry I hear is that Oracle has deliberately let go of the core teams that have a chance to take loving care of MySQL. So releasing IMPORTANT features developed over the last years onto Community Server – such as Foreign Keys – is at most a one-time thing. Those who could build further cool features have left the building.
The unpleasant truth: MySQL is in maintenance mode
The paradox is real, but it is not accidental:
If you are worried about the future of MySQL, the conclusion is not to create a parallel structure, a new trademark, or yet another fork.
The pleasant truth: MySQL lives on in MariaDB
Let me start from one of the questions I hear most often these days:
The MySQL skill set is drop-in compatible with MariaDB
Poking a bit of fun at our past, somewhat unfortunate positioning of MariaDB as a drop-in replacement of MySQL: The MySQL skill set of all the DBAs and other database experts have is highly reusable when migrating to MariaDB.
If you are part of the MySQL community and worry about its future, there is a practical reality worth acknowledging: You do not need to invent a parallel structure or a new fork. The work you want done is already being done — in public, in the open, and at scale — by MariaDB.
The solution: MySQL 8.0 lives forever in MariaDB 11.8+
That conclusion is understandable, but misleading.
Another pleasant truth: MariaDB is much more than MySQL
The constructive next step is to engage with MariaDB, and within the MariaDB Foundation.
Because MariaDB is at the same time a completely independent database and a fundamentally compatible extension of MySQL, the MySQL user base is not dependent upon Oracle nor upon new forks of MySQL for their future. For pragmatical reasons – and those have always carried weight in the MySQL universe – MariaDB is part of the MySQL ecosystem.
- The Oracle compatibility mode. This enables DBS Bank and other high-end enterprise customers to get rid of high-cost closed source Oracle Database solutions.
- MariaDB Vector. High-performing AI functionality, building a bridge from real-world relational user data to the world of LLMs and AI.
- Fifteen years of user-driven innovation. Anything from system-versioned tables to security plugins, all neatly summarised in the celebratory blog by the father of MySQL and MariaDB. Monty. Monty says: Celebrating 15 years of MariaDB.
Compatibility with the past of MySQL, focus on the future
The synthesis of the Yes and No into the German “Jein” (a mixture of “Ja” and “Nein”) is not just a beneficial one, but the very one that makes MariaDB the future of MySQL.
Yes, MySQL lives on in MariaDB. Upgrading is as easy as it can be, and one can discuss whether it is worthy of the concept “migration” – as upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.11 certainly was easier than upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0.
The next step in the puzzle is a bit of wishful thinking. Since Oracle isn’t really putting in the love and care that MySQL deserves, let “us”, the MySQL ecosystem, organise around a structure that does so. Let us develop a tracking fork! A fork that builds new functionality around the core Oracle MySQL.
The conclusion: MariaDB is its own database, and the natural continuation of MySQL
MariaDB did not emerge as a replica of MySQL, but as a response to what MySQL taught us and how Oracle changed MySQL’s trajectory. Shared roots do not imply shared philosophy. On the contrary: MariaDB exists precisely because the community learned, the hard way, what didn’t work the first time (during the independent times of MySQL AB) – and, what didn’t work the second time (during Oracle’s ownership of MySQL).
Shared origins do not imply shared destiny.
When boiling down to the essentials, a core feeling amongst many MySQL users seems to be that they want to stay on with MySQL, provided it has a future. They are more or less happy with MySQL 8.0 – performance, high availability, ease of use – but note it is fast approaching end of life. The trust in the performance and compatibility of MySQL 8.4 and MySQL 9.7 isn’t yet there.
If you care about MySQL’s future, the practical conclusion is not to fragment the community further. The continuation already exists. It is open, governed, and evolving. The choice is not between loyalty and progress — it is between duplication and consolidation.
Enter MariaDB. Or, rather, we entered 15 years ago with MariaDB 5.1 as a fork of MySQL. We have been developing on top of MySQL and beside MySQL ever since, but are now perceived as answering the most urgent question posed today – what is the future of MySQL?
Making the right decision for the future requires us to understand where we are today. For many users, the practical reality today is that MySQL feels like it has entered a form of maintenance mode.
