A friend of mine mentioned that Suse and another Linux distribution were going to switch from MySQL to MariaDB. So I got curious and looked at it. According to their website, it is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. You can uninstall MySQL, install MariaDB and things will just work. No need to change any code.
The thing that impressed me about MariaDB is that they have XtraDB engine (among other engines not available in MySQL) which is supposed to be a better implementation of InnoDB. Percona offers it for MySQL if you buy their services. So, I was glad to see that it is being packaged with MariaDB. For those of you who want to try out document based databases like MongoDB, CouchBase, etc. MariaDB supports document based database engines too. So you can have an relational database and an document/object database in one server.
I found out about MariaDB not that long ago. So, I have yet to explore all the things it can and cannot do. But, if all of these features make you curious, you can head over to their website (https://mariadb.org) to learn more.