The Alpine Wiki isn't written by MySQL/MariaDB experts, and is focused on an installation / very basic administrative perspective; from that angle they're not too different. But they've substantially diverged in terms of internals, advanced administrative functionality, and overall focus.

source: I've been working in this space for 19 years, at scales ranging from tiny startups, to largest known mysql installation in the world.

The amount of informations around is surprisingly poor; it's hard to find technical information.

At least a significant difference is MariadDB's addition of several specialized engines - see https://mariadb.com/kb/en/storage-engines:

- MariaDB ColumnStore: Column-based

- Mroonga: Full text search

- OQGRAPH: Graph storage

- SphinxSE: Full text search

Where the above use cases are required, it's actually a big deal. A common use case may be FT searches - MySQL's support is a trainwreck, and I have the suspicion that Oracle has little to no interest in it.

Curious to learn more about Mroonga. FT has been a sticking point for several sites we've built, and the search daemons (typesense, meilisearch) tend to not as accurate as we'd like.

Same. I’ll have to take a look as well. The built-in FT going back to MyISAM and later was ok for small things, but needed to remain in memory wand dint handle lots of updates well. At one point we split a table into shards on the same database to ease locking issues.

One thing I wish were available was a hybrid btree and inverted index. If you are multi tenant then you want your search to only happen within the one user’s data — not across all accounts and then filter for the one user.

Yeah true. Any good comparisons you can point us at?

This is from a very reliable source but is 4 years old (pre-MySQL 8): https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/11/02/mysql-vs-mariadb-rea...

Separately you can search for "What's new in MySQL 8" type posts, nearly everything there is unique to MySQL. Some of the 5.7 stuff too, like native json column type.

Ditto for recent MariaDB releases, btw! To be fair they have some cool stuff that MySQL lacks, such as system versioned tables, Oracle DB compatibility layer, native column types for uuid and inet6 (IPv6 addresses), etc.

Mariadb has an oracle compatibility layer??? Ah but it's at the query layer not the wire protocol. Still very cool.

Now that apis aren't patentable we might see something some day. I imagine reverse engineering it might be hard though.