| Company | Oracle Corp. (former MySQL AB) | Percona LLC | MariaDB Corp. (former SkySQL) |
| FromDual support |  |  |  |
| GA versions | 5.5, 5.6 | 5.5, 5.6 | 5.5, 10.0 |
| Galera Cluster | supported | supported | supported |
| License | GPL, commercial (OEM!) | GPL | GPL, LGPL, BSD |
| Ancestry | Mother of all | Branch of actual release | Fork of MySQL 5.5 |
| Storage Engines | Archive, Blackhole, CSV, Federated (disabled), InnoDB (default), Memory, MyISAM | Archive, Blackhole, CSV, Federated (disabled), InnoDB (default), Memory, MyISAM, TokuDB | Archive, Aria (crash-safe MyISAM), Blackhole, Cassandra, CSV, FederatedX, InnoDB (default), Memory, MyISAM, OQGraph (Graph-SE), TokuDB |
| Storage Engine enforcement | | yes | |
| Fulltext search | MyISAM: yes InnoDB: yes | MyISAM: yes InnoDB: yes | MyISAM: yes Aria: yes InnoDB: yes, Sphinx-SE |
| Partitions | available | available | available |
| Plugins | Auth, Auth Socket, MemcacheD, SemiSync Repl | Auth PAM, Auth Socket, Handlersocket, MemcacheD, SemiSync Repl | Auth PAM, Auch Socket, Connect SE, Handlersocket, Sequence, Sphinx, Spider, QueryCache Info, SemiSync Repl |
| MemcacheD | available | | |
| virtual Columns | Since 5.7.6 | | since 5.2 |
| Performance |
| General | All 3 branches/forks have roughly the same performance. They mostly distinguish in features not in performance. |
PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA | enabled (5.6) | enabled (5.6), userstats | enabled (10.0) |
| Thread Pool | 5.5, commercial plugin | 5.5 and 5.6 | 5.1 - 5.3 (old), 5.5 (new) |
DML EXPLAIN | 5.6 | 5.6? | |
JSON EXPLAIN | 5.6 | 5.6? | |
| Optimizer Trace | 5.6 | 5.6? | |
| Table elimination | | | available |
| Security |
| Roles | | | since 10.0.5 |
| Password expiration | since 5.6 | since 5.6 | since 10.0? |
| Password validation | Plugin since 5.6.6 | Plugin since 5.6 | Worklog, comes in 10.1/10.2 |
| Password complexity | commercial? | | |
| PAM Authentication | MySQL 5.5, commercial plugin | since 5.5 | since 5.2 |
| Backup | mysqldump, mysqlbackup | mysqldump, XtraBackup | mysqldump, XtraBackup |
| Audit Plugin | 5.5 a, b MyAfee Audit Plugin | 5.5 and 5.6 MyAfee Audit Plugin | 5.5 MyAfee Audit Plugin |
| Slow Query Log | available | available, improved | available |
| Replication |
| Master/Slave |  |  |  |
| multi-Source Replication | MySQL 5.7-labs | unknown | MariaDB 10.0 |
| parallel Replication | MySQL 5.6 (per Schema) | Percona 5.6 (per Schema) | MariaDB 10.0 (per Instance!) |
| GTID | MySQL style | MySQL style | MariaDB style (incompatibility!) |
| MySQL | Percona | MariaDB |