Well that's a good question and there are a lot of factors within it. Though, the main reasons that turns it a good option are the following: - Developers (some [though not all] of them we're very closely related to the MySQL codebase and know it very well, this in my opinion can start adding a serious problem to the MySQL(the lack of original coders)) - Community and Foundation (the security fixes appear to be fixed faster on MariaDB http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Security-updates-for-MariaDB-1795866.html), Also the foundation is starting to have support from some important companies and some linux distributions by default(Fedora, Red Hat Based - Which I believe could give a significant boost to it being enabled by default on a future red hat enterprise linux 8, OpenSuse by Novell, Slackware, among others)http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Fedora-19-MariaDB-instead-of-MySQL-but-no-Btrfs-1795146.html, http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-new-in-openSUSE-12-3-1822738.html?page=2. Don't get me wrong I don't think Oracle or even the previous Sun Microsystem, have done a terrible job with their database, but times are showing that projects that have open source code and that allow their community to fork it and become independent are much better handle then from a "solo" company who starts trying maintaining everything for themselves will start falling in some holes before completly fall on them. The License of mariaDB seems to allow code from MySQL to be imported, though Oracle could do a kick back and put MySQL the apache license on it's code and starting importing mariaDB (not as bad as it sounds, not sure). - A drop in replacement for some versions(yes it does have some caveats and no guaranties for future versions yet) of MySQL https://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-compatibility/ - Some perfomance improvements (though I don't believe they make a ground shaker yet). - And the verbose output, I'm hearing some good things about this (and a feature that I think it'd come in handy). Anyway, this is a very complex application that laying a finger on it could get it flying, and like the old saying: If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Daniel