Is RDS for MySQL Compatible with MariaDB?

MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL source code. It is maintained by the open-source community and uses GPL licensing. One of the reasons for developing MariaDB is that Oracle acquired MySQL, so there is a chance that MySQL could become closed source. The community developed MariaDB to protect against this risk. MariaDB is compatible with MySQL for the most part. It was designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL, including the APIs and commands. There is no difference for front-end applications (such as PHP, Perl, Python, Java, .NET, MyODBC, Ruby, and MySQL C connector). As for the storage engine, MariaDB uses XtraDB to replace the InnoDB of MySQL. XtraDB is fully compatible with InnoDB and InnoDB tables can be converted into XtraDB tables by default.

Although MariaDB is a branch of MySQL, some changes have been made to MariaDB. Common applications that used MySQL databases can normally switch to MariaDB databases for data additions, deletions, modifications, or queries. But MariaDB is different from MySQL in terms of some new features. To ensure that MariaDB fits your application perfectly, a proof of concept (POC) is required.