Version
You can check the version of MariaDB you're using by running the following command in the MySQL client:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'version';
This will return a single row with two columns, Variable_name and Value. The value column will contain the version
About MariaDB
MariaDB is developed by Michael Widenius, the same developer of MySQL, the first release was made available to the
public
in October 2009. Maria DB is an authorized fork of MySQL, which stands for “structured query language”.
The applications for MySQL are similar to MariaDB, with of course some differences that will become apparent
as you continue to read this article. Essentially, what Maria DB is, is a relational database management system
(RDBMS).
It is mostly used for data warehousing, data management, and even some applications in data analysis
and data science for those who find it useful in their context to have this possibility.
The specific functionalities of Maria DB will likely make you see why a lot of people utilize it,
including big companies like Red Hat, Deutsche Bank, and even Nasdaq. First, Maria Db offers support for PHP,
which is one of the most popular back-end programming languages, which is very often linked with HTML,
a front-end one. With this in mind, MariaDB serves a purpose in web development and fits seamlessly in the
toolkit
of a developer looking to store website data. MariaDB is comparatively smoother than MySQL, which means
that some people prefer it when expecting to work with larger and more demanding data sets or processes
for a given database.
MariaDB has some interesting uses besides web development, for example, it hosts the MariaDB platform for
analytics,
which claims to make modern analytics easy, and makes a very fine argument on how it does that.
First, it is infinitely easier to install than other platforms of this quality, and it queries data faster
than many platforms, sometimes up to twice the speed. Running queries on data can give great ideas on
key performance indicators, give a good sense of what to present for a business meeting, or simply
extract interesting patterns from a group of ordered data. This toolkit appeals to data analysts who
are more academic, as well as business data analytic people who look to extract insights from large
datasets.
Releases
MariaDB 13.0 is the current stable rolling release (13.0.2, 15th September 2026) and MariaDB 12.3 is the latest long-term support release (GA since 28th May 2026, supported until June 2029); MariaDB now publishes quarterly rolling releases and a yearly LTS.
This is, of course, a very active community of developers and users to make plausible yearly
updates that add features and solve bugs in the manner that MariaDB does.