MariaDB

MariaDB is an enterprise open source relational database, offered as community software and as MariaDB Enterprise with a managed cloud service priced by node size and hour, including Power and PowerPlus tiers covering geo-distributed resilience and real-time analytics.

MariaDB exists because of what happened to MySQL, and that history is the reason organisations choose it. When Oracle acquired MySQL through Sun, MySQL's original authors forked it, and MariaDB is the answer to the question of what happens if the steward's commercial interests diverge from the users'.

Drop-in compatibility with MySQL is what makes that answer usable rather than theoretical, since an application, a driver and an administrator's habits all transfer, which turns a strategic decision about vendor risk into a manageable migration rather than a rewrite.

Publishing hourly cloud rates by node size is the honest structure for a managed database and it lets a team model cost against the instance they actually need. The PowerPlus tier adding real-time analytics alongside transactional workloads addresses the pattern that otherwise forces a second system and a pipeline between them. Rates start at 0.13 dollars an hour. Alongside the core engine, MariaDB covers replication and high availability, hourly pricing by node size, aWS and multi-cloud availability and community edition free to use, which is the practical surface a team works with day to day.