- MariaDB Corporation was founded by original developers of MySQL and provides commercial support for MariaDB and MySQL. It has over 400 enterprise customers globally. - MariaDB is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL that is open source and offers additional features like improved performance, security, and scalability. It has been adopted by several Linux distributions as the default database. - MariaDB offers several advantages over MySQL for applications like Drupal, including its XtraDB storage engine, SphinxSE search engine, thread pool feature for handling many concurrent queries efficiently, and Galera Cluster for high availability.