Further to our original post, we have now carried out a series of tests and are pleased to say that we have found no problems with using MariaDB with Joomla. Our tests compared version 5.5_44 of Maria DB and MySQL and to all intents and purposes no difference is noticeable. We cannot say there is any difference performance wise, since we were testing upon different server instances, which makes such a comparison impossible to determine.
We can also say that our NAS in now running MariaDB as standard, so we will be using this version (5.5.44) for all our development work henceforth.
“For all practical purposes, MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version (for example MySQL 5.1 -> MariaDB 5.1, MariaDB 5.2 & MariaDB 5.3 are compatible. MySQL 5.5 is compatible with MariaDB 5.5). What this means is that:
- Data and table definition files (.frm) files are binary compatible.
- All client APIs, protocols and structs are identical.
- All filenames, binaries, paths, ports, sockets, and etc... should be the same.
- All MySQL connectors (PHP, Perl, Python, Java, .NET, MyODBC, Ruby, MySQL C connector etc) work unchanged with MariaDB.
- There are some installation issues with PHP5 that you should be aware of (a bug in how the old PHP5 client checks library compatibility).
- The
mysql-clientpackage also works with MariaDB server. - The shared client library is binary compatible with MySQL's client library. “