Zur “Original” bzw. Enterprise Distribution von (mittlerweile) Oracle gibt es eine Vielzahl von Alternativen:
| Name | Lizenz | Beschreibung | Kompatibilität | Operativer Support |
| Drizzle | GPLv2 und BSD | Drizzle is a community-driven open source project that is forked from the popular MySQL database. The Drizzle team has removed non-essential code, re-factored the remaining code and modernized the code base moving to C++. | Nur durch die Community | |
| Percona Server | Percona Server with XtraDB is a backwards-compatible drop-in replacement for MySQL that provides improved performance, diagnostics and instrumentation, and manageability of the server. It includes the blazing-fast XtraDB storage engine and the non-blocking XtraBackup backup utility. | Percona’s binaries are based upon recent releases of the MySQL server source code | Durch Percona. Diverse Supportstufen verfügbar. | |
| MariaDB | GPLv2 | MariaDB is an enhanced, backwards-compatible, drop-in replacement of MySQL®. It is independently developed by the original core developers of MySQL and others in the MariaDB community and has 1-2 releases per year. | In most respects MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL: all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! | Kommerzieller Support durch Monty Program |
