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 fully compatible with MySQL. It was designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL, including the APIs and commands. 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.

MariaDB is compatible with MySQL for the most part, and front-end applications (such as PHP, Perl, Python, Java, .NET, MyODBC, Ruby, and MySQL C connector) notice almost no difference between them. They are fully compatible for common operations like INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE, and QUERY. However, when MariaDB-specific features are involved, differences do exist between the two systems. Perform proof-of-concept (POC) tests to verify that MariaDB suits your application needs.