For those interested, MariaDB is an alternative to MySQL that is (supposedly) 100% compatible with MySQL.
Considering the uncertain future of the MySQL project and the general attitude of Oracle, it's definitely worth a shot to give a try and test it out in your dev/test environment.
First, let's assume you use yum (if you're installing from source, I don't think you really need any help there).
Create a new repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ (in my example it's for mariadb 5.5 and centos 6 64bits)
cat << EOF > /etc/yum.repos.d/mariadb.repo
[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.5/centos6-amd64
gpgcheck=1
EOF
import the GPG keys:
rpm --import http://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDBthen just install it by running:
yum install MariaDB-Server
