What variant of SQL does MariaDB use?

Question

It's typical for a Relational Database Management System to use a specific variant of SQL. For example, SQL Server uses Transact-SQL aka T-SQL.

I understand MariaDB is based on MySQL (the RDBMS), and the SQL variant that MySQL uses is apparently itself also called MySQL (according to this question ). Should I assume MariaDB also uses the MySQL language?

I have tried several Google searches, but I've found nothing. It's tricky because of the conflation between the RDBMS and the language. Most results are just comparing MariaDB with MySQL (the RDBMS).

Answer 1

MariaDB does indeed use the same SQL dialect as MySQL.

But, later versions of MariaDB have extra features, which show up mostly as settings and functions in the query language. The MariaDB team's list of differences is here: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/mariadb-vs-mysql-features/

The big ones, from my personal perspective, mostly in MariaDB 10.2 and later.

• The SEQUENCE storage engine: generates sequences of cardinal numbers. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/sequence-storage-engine/ This shows up as specially formatted table names like sequence_1_to_42 .

Before MySQL 8, MariaDb had some capabilities absent in MySQL. These are all in MySQL 8+

• Window functions: ranking, distributions, etc. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/sequence-storage-engine/
• Common Table Expressions https://mariadb.com/kb/en/recursive-common-table-expressions-overview/
• ... and the WITH clause to use them. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/with/
• Regular expressions to operate on data not just match it. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/pcre/

MySQL Version 8 has better versions of REGEXP_REPLACE() and REXEXP_SUBSTR() than MariaDb's versions of the two .