Chapter 1. Understanding the Essentials of MariaDB

This chapter provides a generic overview of the MariaDB architecture. Note that this description is not meant to teach MariaDB to new users; some knowledge of the software is necessary to fully understand this book.

The following topics will be discussed in this chapter:

• The MariaDB architecture
• The workflow of SQL statement processing
• Usage and tricks of the command-line client used, in all chapters of this book
• Storage engines and their characteristics
• Logs
• Caches
• User authentication and permissions
• The INFORMATION_SCHEMA and PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA system databases
• Compatibility with MySQL and other DBMS
• Resources on the Web