MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was created after the Oracle acquisition. I suspected Alfresco would run fine on top of it, but was surprised at how easy it was to do.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Literally. You don’t have to change anything, really. Uninstall MySQL, install MariaDB, restart Alfresco, done. Same driver. Same connection string. Same tables. Same mysql command-line client.

If you install from MacPorts, watch out for this gotcha, otherwise, it is no big deal.

You don’t need both installed, but if both MySQL and MariaDB are installed via MacPorts, you can switch between the two with “sudo port select –set mysql mariadb”.

Despite the compatibility, Alfresco does not list MariaDB on the list of supported databases, so Enterprise Edition users should not do this on production machines.