Overall Satisfaction with MySQL
As a Wordpress user and developer, I've been using MySQL on almost all of our projects for years, it's very common and hosting solutions with MySQL are usually cheap, so it's a no-brainer to use it. Also, there's a ton of applications that make it very easy to interact and manage MySQL databases, so you don't have to be an expert at all.
- It's very cheap to find hosting solutions with it
- WordPress and many other CMSs rely on it
- There are a lot of GUI applications that make it much easier to work with MySQL
- It's rather easy to understand how it works
- Big projects can't rely on MySQL since it's performance is not that good
- Security is one of the major concerns
- We've had some stability issues with some projects with a lot of users
- It's free to use locally, has no impact whatsoever in our finances
- Hosting solutions (shared or VPS, for instance) are very common and cheap
- Our go-to CMS (WordPress) uses it, so it's a no-brainer to use it on every project we deliver
I'm not that expert on MariaDB, but as far as I know, it has great support from tools and frameworks, but it's not that usual to find hosting with it installed rather than MySQL. Since MariaDB is a 'fork' from MySQL (since it was bought by Oracle), the transition from MySQL is very straightforward to do. Also, it's a common choice among developers who don't want to rely on a single company (Oracle) and it has strong support from its contributors (developers and engineers).