Rename Maria
From Askmonty.org
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Backstory
Monty initially only planned to work on a next generation MyISAM called Maria, which would be crash safe and eventually support transactions. Little did he know that in due time, he would not only be working on a storage engine, but also a complete branch of the MySQL database. Not coming up with a name almost immediately, he decided to call it MariaDB, after his daughter, Maria.
Today
Today, we find that MariaDB encompasses all major open source storage engines (PBXT, FederatedX, XtraDB, OQGraph and more), a myriad number of bug fixes to the database server, and many community features, so much so that it is now much more than "a branch of MySQL that contains the Maria engine". In fact, it has become a true full-blown fork of MySQL, with the aim of being a drop-in replacement for the world's most popular open source database.
Renaming Maria (the engine)
To prevent confusion, it seemed like a wise choice to get the storage engine, Maria, renamed. MariaDB is already making a name for itself, and the trademarks are owned in numerous regions. Monty has no more children (his suggestion was Lucy, the name of his dog!), so we decided that the next best thing was to rely on the community for renaming the Maria Storage Engine.
How did we gather options? By running a contest, of course!
The contest ran until the end of May 2010. After that the best names were voted on by the community and Monty picked and announced the winner at OSCon 2010 in Portland.
The new name for the Maria storage engine is: Aria
The person who suggested the name, Chris Tooley, received a Linux-powered System 76 Meerkat NetTop from Monty Program.
Conclusion
With another name for the storage engine, we can use the name MariaDB to refer to the relational database management system without confusing it with the storage engine.
