To be perfectly accurate, MariaDB is a fork of MySQL created by its
original developer, after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which had
previously purchased MySQL. Everyone knew that Oracle would not treat MySQL
in good faith. I think today you can treat MySQL as effectively dead, and
MariaDB as its continuation.


Bruce Perens K6BP

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 09:42 Marc Shapiro via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> I haven't done any database stuff in quite a while, and I was looking at
> MySQL.
>
> I found default-mysql-server, which depends on mariadb-server-compat,
> which depends on mariadb-server.
>
> Running mysqladmin ping returns:
>
> 'mysqld is alive'
>
>
> Running mysqladmin version returns:
>
> mysqladmin from 11.8.3-MariaDB, client 10.0 for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64)
> Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.
>

> Server version        11.8.3-MariaDB-0+deb13u1 from Debian
> Protocol version    10
> Connection        Localhost via UNIX socket
> UNIX socket        /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
> Uptime:            12 hours 1 min 58 sec

>
> So, is mariadb what is actually running, with a compatibility layer to
> allow mysql commands? If so, then I would assume that I can treat the
> installation as either mysql, or mariadb. Is this correct? Is there
> any reason to treat it as one, or the other?
>
> Marc
>
>
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