Review of MariaDB with XtraDB Engine powered by the Slant community.
MySQL compatible fork of MySQl by the original programmer who continued with MariaDB after Oracle bought MySQL.
The different paths mean that MariaDb is compatible with MySQL implementations, but since MariaDB adds features not present in MySQL the reverse may not be true.
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Pros
Pro Compatible with MySQL
Compatability with MySQL means other languages (PHP, PERL and so on) or tools that need to interface with the database work here as well