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WordPress originally developed using MySQL databases but currently over 5% of all active WordPress installs are using MariaDB. An increase of 25% since the beginning of the year.

Brief History

As WordPress is an open source project, it was based on an open source database – MySQL.

In 2008 MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion, and a year later Oracle Corporation acquired Sun for $7 billion and took control over MySQL trademark and copyrights.

Michael Widenius, the founder of MySQL, left the company and forked the code to create MariaDB – a new open source database. I personally like the fact that the first project was named after his daughter “My”, and the second project named after his younger daughter “Maria”.

WordPress and MariaDB

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL 5.5, that is why you can run WordPress over MariaDB – they both share the same base. The developers of maria tried very hard to keep compatibility with MySQL to make it easy to migrate data from one DB to the other and take the advantage of its better performance.

It seems like WordPress users are starting to notice Maria.

At the beginning of the year MariaDB 10.0 and 10.1 used by 4% of all active WordPress installs. Ten months later over 5% of all active installs use Maria. In total, MariaDB market share in WordPress has been increased by 25% since the beginning of 2017.

For comparison, in 2016, active WordPress installs used MariaDB was increased from 2.3% at the beginning of the year to 4% at the end of the year. An increase of 74%.