Oracle seems to do large feature drops every few years, while MariaDB has been shipping features incrementally every 6 months or so. The first couple of version

Oracle seems to do large feature drops every few years, while MariaDB has been shipping features incrementally every 6 months or so. The first couple of versions were the exception: they pulled an enormous amount of functionality from other forks, many of which have since been removed (things like the TokuDB storage engine). Left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth (how can you depend on a database that shoves 50 features in, and then removes 20 of them during the next few years). We have low visibility into MySQL development process (is the bug tracker still closed? I am not sure), so when they shipped 8.0 in 2018 it was quite a surprise. They fixed a number of outstanding issues, including many extremely bad defaults (like using proper Unicode by default). Some things added in 8.0 (like atomic DDL) are still not available in MariaDB. Oracle being Oracle, there haven't been any major releases since.