I was recently looking at engine distribution across a few thousand production database instances.
What stood out is that some teams believed they were running MySQL, but were actually on MariaDB.
In most cases this isn’t confusion. It’s environment defaults.
Many Linux distributions replaced MySQL with MariaDB years ago. Hosting panels and cloud images often install MariaDB by default. The mysql client works the same. ORMs abstract most differences. From the application layer, everything looks like “MySQL.”
Is your database engine an intentional architectural choice, or something inherited from your base image or hosting stack?
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