The computer world has unnoticed become a Finnish region. Just like Lapland, but very different...

How do I mean that? Well, the computer world has been decisively influenced and changed direction by Linus Torvalds (1969), the creator of Linux, the great alternative to Windows. In fact, Windows has quite a bit of Linux in its innards, but that's an aside...  And Google's OSes are also based on the foundation of Linux, including Android and Chrome OS.

But a decent OS needs a good database system to build nice apps. Under MS-DOS and later also under Windows you had DBase and later Foxbase and Clipper. For Linux variants, another Finn, Michael Widenius (1962) created an SQL app named after his eldest daughter, My. So MySQL. a damn handy app, with which you could build and manage excellent databases. Michael and his friends needed money to expand their business, and after several outside financings, the company was sold to Sun Microsystems for about $1 billion. Sun further sold MySQL to Oracle and that actually turned it into a different product. The last "old" version of MySQL was 5.7.29 and then after some time, Oracle made MySQL 8.0. Such a big jump in version numbering is an obvious symptom... Not a problem for me at all, because MySQL 5.7.29 still runs fine on Ubuntu up to and including the last regular LTS release, 18.04.

But as I wrote before, my home server is now running Ubuntu 20.04, a beta version of the future LTS version. And it comes with MySQL 8.0... That's no problem for Drupal 8, it adapts perfectly. But for Drupal 7 and older versions, the new MySQL is gruesome. Going back to MySQL 5.7 seems obvious, but brings with it all sorts of administrative problems. How do you prevent the default software management app from installing new versions of the new MySQL, even if they are security releases?

Back to Michael Widenius. He was not at all happy that his brainchild had finally ended up at Oracle and that it had changed quite a bit. So he started again. He made an app that outwardly behaved just like his previous brainchild but now named it after his youngest daughter, Maria. The app is called MariaDB and can be easily installed on all kinds of Linux versions. If you type 'MySQL' in such an installation, you automatically end up in 'MariaDB', in a version that behaves exactly like 'MySQL 5.7'. So the problem is solved. I can now also install a version of Drupal 7 on my home server if only to test all kinds of modules that are still new to me.

This is how you keep busy...

Incidentally, no Computer Finn has achieved the financial success of someone like Bill Gates or even Steve Jobs. Probably because those Finns are real techies and more interested in technical success than financial...