MariaDB is popular fork of MySQL, founded by Monty Widenius, the main author of the original version of MySQL. As Serdar Yegulalp explains in his MariaDB tutorial: Get started with MariaDB, MariaDB has “many powerful features included by default rather than only available as add-ons, and many performance, usability, and security improvements that aren’t guaranteed to show up in MySQL.”
In this article, I’ll show you the basic elements of how to query a MariaDB database with SQL. After installing MariaDB (on the Mac in my case), we’ll walk through the steps of connecting to a database, loading data, and various queries including table joins. We’ll finish with a brief discussion of MariaDB extensions and some recommendations for further learning.
Install MariaDB
Serdar lays out the options for installing MariaDB in his article, and provides some links to the MariaDB downloads and installation instructions. I’ll suggest also reading MariaDB’s Introduction to Relational Databases and Getting Started pages.
I installed MariaDB on an iMac, using Homebrew. Before the installation shown below, I ran brew update so that I would be sure to get the latest version of MariaDB.
