I've been looking into maybe using MariaDB for my database server, I heard that in some cases it's faster. Is this true? If so and I decide to use it instead of MySQL how would this benefit my server plugins performance such as CoreProtect? I'm already good managing my MySQL databases on Ubuntu server. I know MariaDB is a fork of MySQL... So I think it wouldn't change the way I manage my databases to much.
I think you should stay on MySQL. MariaDB is still new and evolving, but so far it's worth the wait. But only one question - how it relates to bukkit?