Understanding how MariaDB differs in Ubuntu 16.04

Before we dive into managing our database server, we'll first go over a few ways in which MariaDB differs on Ubuntu 16.04 when compared to implementations on other distributions. For the most part, the differences are with regards to how authentication is handled to the MariaDB shell. The MariaDB shell is used to manage our database (which we'll get to shortly) and can be accessed with the mysql command:

# mysql

With that command, you'll immediately be given a MariaDB prompt, which will allow you to execute commands to manage your database configuration. However, you'll probably notice that the mysql command didn't prompt you for your root password. Instead, it immediately provided you with a MariaDB prompt. This may be surprising to those of you that have used MySQL before on other platforms. With other distributions, the default configuration will prompt you for the password for the root MariaDB shell, even if you're already logged in as...