MariaDB had its first GA release in February 2010 (MariaDB 5.1, based on MySQL 5.1). Since then, we've released MariaDB 5.2 (based on MySQL 5.1), MariaDB 5.3 (based on MySQL 5.1) and MariaDB 5.5 (based on MySQL 5.5 with all features up to MariaDB 5.3). Two years and four major releases with a tonne of major features. Why should you care about it? This is not a talk about the community around MariaDB, but a feature-by-feature blowout as to why you should consider this database.
Expect such a session to be packed with useful features that MariaDB has, and you will soon learn why you might consider migrating to the drop-in replacement to MySQL. Yes, did we mention, its fully backward compatible?