MariaDB is now clearly listed as the recommended database in Drupal’s official documentation. Following community discussion on Drupal.org, the Database server requirements now lists MariaDB first, and identifies it as the recommended database for Drupal 10, 11, and 12. Drupal is a major open source content management system—a flexible platform used by a substantial share of websites globally. 

We’re glad to see this. Recognition matters because MariaDB is often used but documented as MySQL, going unnoticed under the hood—and when it goes unnamed, the work behind it loses visibility, a point Anna Widenius made in “I Am Not Building Cadillacs Anymore“, on how Henry Ford was long mistaken for the company that took his designs and became Cadillac. The MariaDB Foundation reaches out from time to time where we notice MariaDB is used but not documented as clearly as it could be. We see this as a public service rather than a claim to credit.

I wrote about our initiatives on this in a previous blog, Improving MariaDB support in open source projects. Since then many projects have given MariaDB more explicit mention in documentation, READMEs and elsewhere. In WordPress MariaDB has passed MySQL in usage by the official statistics—often without users realising which database they run.

Speaking of recognition and Drupal: a shout out to jcmartinez, whose MariaDB VDB Provider module brings native vector search to Drupal on MariaDB. It uses the VECTOR type and indexing introduced in MariaDB 11.8 LTS to store and query AI embeddings—semantic search, RAG—directly in the database, no separate vector service needed. It’s exactly the kind of community work that makes MariaDB more useful, and worth naming.