Databases are great—they keep Database Administrators (DBAs) in jobs, and they provide a convenient way of storing data on a system that isn't a series of randomly sized flat files in a directory.
Traditionally, databases have been a great place to store ordered data of specific type and size, meaning that you get databases backing all sorts of things, from bank transaction records to website inventory numbers.
SQL databases are what people are most familiar with (more on NoSQL databases later), and one of the most common is MariaDB, which is a fork of MySQL.
MariaDB was forked from MySQL after the acquisition of the latter by Oracle. This is perhaps an understandable concern, as a lot of people in the open source space view Oracle as evil, though naturally I have no strong feelings one way or the other.
If you run a Wordpress...
