Aria (storage engine)

Aria is a storage engine for the MariaDB and MySQL relational database management systems. Its goal is to make a crash-safe alternative to MyISAM. It is not transactional.

Aria has been in development since 2007 and was first announced by Michael "Monty" Widenius on his blog. Aria is used for internal temporary tables in MariaDB, a community-developed branch of the MySQL database led by Widenius. Aria is not shipped with MySQL or Percona Server.

Aria was initially named "Maria", as a reference to Monty's youngest child. It was renamed Aria in 2010 to avoid confusion with the main database it is developed for, MariaDB. Chris Tooley, who won a contest to suggest the name, wrote, "Aria is Maria without the 'M'; also it is a pleasant musical term."