MariaDB

MariaDB is a dropin replacement of MySQL, forked by the community from the latter.

Installation

$ su root
$ yum install mariadb mariadb-server

Initial setup

First let's start MariaDB

$ systemctl start mariadb

Now start the secure installation assistant

$ mysql_secure_installation

Press enter if you didn't have setup a password previously

Then it is advisable to answer as follows

Set root password? [Y/n] Y

Do not use root account password
Do not provide the system administrator's password for your Linux system here. Use a different strong password, since this is a separate authentication for a MySQL user called "root."

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] Y

To start MariaDB on boot

$ systemctl enable mariadb

GUI frontends

There are some popular frontends such as phpMyAdmin

Default installation and configuration files

The configuration files are stored in the /etc/my.cnf.d/ directory and the main configuration file is /etc/my.cnf

The default log file is /var/log/mysqld.log

The default installation directory is /var/lib/mysql