1. MySQL was created by a Swedish company, MySQL AB, founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael “Monty” Widenius.
2. The name MySQL owes its name to co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius’s daughter My.
3. The first version of MySQL appeared on 23 May 1995. It was initially created for personal usage from mSQL based on the low-level language ISAM, which the creators considered too slow and inflexible.
4. MySQL is written in C and C++. Its SQL parser is written in yacc.
5. In January 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB for $1 billion.
6. In January 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB due to concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. MariaDB is based on the same code base as MySQL server 5.5 and aims to maintain compatibility with Oracle-provided versions.
7. The day Oracle announced the purchase of Sun, Widenius forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swath of MySQL developers with him.
8. MariaDB is named after Monty’s younger daughter Maria, similar to how MySQL is named after his other daughter My.
9. A movement against Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL AB, to “Save MySQL” from Oracle was started by Monty Widenius. The petition of 50,000+ developers and users called upon the European Commission to block approval of the acquisition.
10. Mariadb merges only released versions of MySQL into MariaDB trunk. it is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version. For example MySQL 5.1 -> MariaDB 5.1, MariaDB 5.2 & MariaDB 5.3 are compatible. MySQL 5.5 is compatible with MariaDB 5.5 and also in practice with MariaDB 10.0, MySQL 5.6 is compatible with MariaDB 10.0 and MySQL 5.7 is compatible with MariaDB 10.2.
