IIRC this was changed: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...-dbalter-class
But I altered that anyway and am using mysql 5.5
I wonder if there was anythign more.

You're right, that was fixed in 388, but those are not used in day to day running of the forum anyway.

I see no reason 387/388 would not run happily on mariadb or mysql 5.6.

My local dev server runs mysql 5.6.14, and I have test vb3 sites that run just fine (even my test vb.org, which is vb 3.6.12).

Thanks. This is all very helpful. I'll upgrade to mysql 5.6 first. If that runs well (which seems likely) then I'll go for MariaDB 10 or even Percona if that turns out to be better.

Did both with no problems, now running 3.8.8.

You might be thinking of the PHP version, which can definitely play into this.

im getting loads of this now:

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.7:

Invalid SQL:

INSERT INTO vb_postlog
(postid, useragent, ip, dateline)
VALUES
(1484838, 'Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9360; en) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.258 Mobile Safari/534.11+', 2927070735, 1403684239);

MySQL Error : Data too long for column 'useragent' at row 1
Error Number : 1406

I have set the string to 255 which is the max, but it still results in errors. Probably because of UFT-8. What to do?

Is it a varchar? Max value of a varchar can be 65535, but maybe you should use `text` instead.

Edit: refer to http://stackoverflow.com/a/18459732/1961685 if you want to make the values to be truncated instead of showing the error.

How to convert my current vbulletin database to MariaDB? Should all the tables be converted or just some.

Do the whole database

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/do...ql-to-mariadb/

You don't have to change anything in the database yourself, all you're changing is the software. Everything else will be the same.

but do the tables need to be changed to aria engine to utilize MariaDB?