Why is MariaDb bundled with Ignition 8

Im totally open to developing Ignition with a MariaDB database backend but most engineers in our company don’t know what it is and are skeptical of new technology when MySQL has served them well for so long. What are the reasons why Ignition is budling MariaDB with Ignition 8 and should we consider phasing MySQL out of our future installs? Is there some sort of nefarious licensing issue lurking in the shadows like there is with Java? Can someone provide the boiler plate conversation points about why MariaDB is better for Ignition going forward because it appears that MySQL provides all the capabilities that our projects require of a database

MariaDB isn’t bundled with Ignition 8.

Are you talking about the MariaDB JDBC driver?

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MariaDB is a fork of MySQL. The vast majority of MySQL developers followed the founder of MySQL over to the MariaDB world. My very subjective view of the situation is that MariaDB gets both bugfixes and new features faster, which has driven adoption of MariaDB in place of MySQL all over the place, including in all major Linux distributions. This adoption, in turn, provides many more developer “eyes” on MariaDB. As the forks diverge further, MySQL is being left in the dust. Oracle (the current owners of MySQL) is not assigning sufficient resources to the MySQL team to keep up. And it can’t really be expected, as Oracle certainly wants to sell licenses for its flagship products.

Personally, I prefer PostgreSQL, and my big clients all use MS SQL Server, so I haven’t exercised all the new stuff in MariaDB. I know many Ignition integrators are fans of MariaDB.

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