I bought a cheap vserver and I set up apache, MySQL etc. at the moment. Which MySQL version is the best currently? I am used to 5.5 but if I see it correctly, there is already MySQL 8 out. Are there any major differences?

I would recommend mariadb 10.2 or 10.3

Yes. And - in particular - many changes that are backwards incompatible or important.

CTE / Table Expressions, recursive, InnoDb changes...

A lot of these changes are very important for statistics (OLAP).

++ for MariaDB :)

MariaDB comments...What’s so good about MariaDB? I need to upgrade a server, hows performance?

@gazza101uk

Performance is much better + it is not owned my Oracle.

MariaDB is a mysql fork that actually gets updated, it would be almost plug and play for all environments and You would need to be doing some pretty interesting SQL queries to have to have a need to rewrite them due to unexpected results to start appearing.

The "MySQL" forks / server is split in 3 parties: Oracle, Percona, MariaDB.

Oracle MySQL has a pretty fucked up QA - it takes alot of time to FULLY understand how fucked it is. Valeriy Kravchuks blog posts are a good start...

Percona. They have become the QA for Oracle. Percona MySQL is very close to MySQL - just with more testing and less "we do not give a fuck" mentality.

Especially known for the Percona Toolkit. If you're an MySQL DBA you should know about Percona Toolkit.

MariaDB. Well... Mixing up several versions of MySQL, forking and adding it's own kind of MyIsam / InnoDB as Aria / Xtra DB was very scary. And they stopped at Version 10.2 - deprecated both.
They're not a compatible drop in for MySQL, that's wrong. Some solutions are better than MySQL - especially replication. But they should stop claiming that they are MySQL compatible. And either fork totally or get closer to MySQL - the approach to mix several different upstream versions and own features is BAD.

MariaDB is forked by the original creator of mysql after oracle bought them and he quit.

That's not correct.

Monty left after Sun took over. (2008)

Then came the infamous 5.1 Release.

Then Oracle bought MySQL. (2010).

MariaDb started 2009.

@IntrusionCM thanks for the correction :)

The point though is that he was one of the founders, so he has a lot of experience with databases.

Yes.... Reason I corrected was that the 5.1 Release was pretty fucked up.
(After the 5.0 release which was very unstable...)

Montys fears became reality.

Oracle waited 2 years and released MySQL 5.5 which was a very good release.

Since then the quality is suffering.

And it's getting worse with every release.

http://databaseblog.myname.nl/2018/...

And this is only from the official accessible bugs.... :(

@IntrusionCM jeeez, does this still holds true? you are taking the shit out of me...I really bought the story that was a drop in replacement, should I be very worried, starting a migration to mysql to RDS mariadb?

@deviloper MariaDb is no longer a drop in replacement - e.g. in MySQL JSON datatype exists, becomes (for compatibility) longtext in MariaDB.

This can lead to some serious issues and is just one example.

I highly recommend to focus and follow the development of one (MySQL or MariaDb)... At least you should really 'see' them as two different non compatible RDBMs with similar SQL Extensions