Beginning Database Design Solutions, 2nd Edition

16MariaDB in Python

This example uses the MariaDB database, which is a descendant of the very popular MySQL database. It is a relational database that has a columnar storage engine to give it column-oriented database features. Those features don't change the way you can use MariaDB as a relational database, but they make large column-oriented queries more efficient. That makes MariaDB particularly useful for data warehousing and large-scale data analysis and analytics.

MariaDB ORIGINS

MySQL comes in a free and open source version and also as a product provided by several vendors. It was owned by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems, which was later acquired by Oracle, who now sells a non-free version of MySQL.

When Oracle acquired Sun, MySQL co-founder Michael Widenius forked the open source version of MySQL to create MariaDB. (If you don't know the term, forked means that Widenius created a new branch or fork in the code tree to start MySQL. It's not a euphemism for something naughty.)

So, MariaDB is a direct descendant of MySQL.

To add a human interest angle to the story, Widenius named MySQL after his older daughter My, MaxDB after his son Max, and MariaDB after his younger daughter Maria. If he invents any new databases, he may need to have more children.

This example builds a database of extraterrestrial animals as described in Chapter 8, “Designing Databases to Support Software.” Figure 16.1 shows the design with some data added ...