MariaDB 10.5 Migration Questions

Question

I have a question, and I've found one similar addressed, which I was going to respond to with my own questions (Live database migration MariaDB 10.5 to MySQL 8.0), however, as that post/question is over a year old, I thought it may be better for me to create a new question.

My Situation: I have a Web server (Apache) hosted by a 3rd party. The server is currently running MariaDB 10.5. On this server we have several sites, running on the last version or two of WordPress, and sites running Drupal 8, 9, and 10. Thus far, we've had no issues. However, we want to begin development of a couple projects on the Drupal 11 platform. When attempting to install D11, we're told that it requires MariaDB 10.6. I've made contact with our hosting company, and they've said that while they won't be upgrading our current server, they are willing to migrate us to another server, and we've been given the option to move to a server running MariaDB 10.6, or a server running MySQL 8. Being 100% honest, I know how to create the databases and from there, I've just let WordPress or Drupal do what they need to do. I've had no reasons to delve deeper into the Databases (Though this is an area that I'd like to learn more about). But for this situation, I'm not sure what is the better option to choose. Of course, objective Number One, would be to not break any of the currently running websites. I presume that migrating from the MariaDB 10.5 server to a MariaDB 10.6 server would be a "clean" move, but admittedly, I'm not positive of that. I'm also not sure what (if any) issues would be caused (or oppositely, benefits would be gained) migrating a MariaDB 10.5 website to a MySQL 8 server. I come to this forum, seeking your wisdom and direction.

Thank you.

Answer 1

In no particular order:

• Although MariaDB and MySQL share common ancestry, they have been separated long enough for the differences (bugs, features) to matter. If you don't have a very compelling reason to choose MySQL at this point, stick to MariaDB.

• You are almost two major versions behind with MariaDB. MariaDB 10.6 will reach its end of life (end of support) one year from now. Unless you want to undertake the same upgrade exercise in under 12 months, I suggest you pick a more recent version.

• You should pick the latest supported version that is also supported by all your various Drupal versions. If that is not possible, you should sort your Drupals first. If you don't, your upgrade planning will be getting more and more difficult every year.

• Running HTTP servers, application servers, and database servers on the same machine is generally a bad idea, from the maintenance, performance, and security perspectives. You should consider setting up a separate database server, unless this is just your hobby.

Answer 2

MariaDB is a great choice for Wordpress and Drupal, and you can't go wrong with just upgrading from MariaDB 10.5 to 10.6. I understand that the hosting company is doing the upgrade/migration for you, but there is actually a MariaDB Knowledge Base article about this exact upgrade, and there might be a few bits of information on this page which might be relevant to you: Upgrading from MariaDB 10.5 to MariaDB 10.6.

That said, note that MariaDB 10.6 only has another year before it's end-of-life (6. July 2026) unless this is MariaDB Enterprise.

As for MySQL 8, is that MySQL 8.0? Note that this was actually end-of-life 30th April 2025, unless the hosting company is paying for extended support.

I don't think there are any particular benefits from using MySQL instead of MariaDB for Wordpress and Drupal. Migrating to MySQL 8 is possible, of course, but is definitely a good bit more challenging than just upgrading to MariaDB 10.6. Since the hosting company is doing the migration for you, you might not have as much control and visibility over the process as you'd like either, and subtle problems such as those related to character sets/collations might not be discovered until later when it could be too late to fix properly.