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: