Not sure about vB 3.*, but on vB 4.* I only changed the software and didn't alter the tables or database at all.

my host currently has MariaDB installed, And i did alter some of the Tables to the engine aria and it did made a huge improvement. So i was thinking about doing all the tables.
If you look at this

-------- Storage Engine Statistics -------------------------------------------
[--] Status: +ARCHIVE +Aria +BLACKHOLE +CSV +FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM
[--] Data in Aria tables: 8M (Tables: 24)
[--] Data in MyISAM tables: 303M (Tables: 379)
[--] Data in InnoDB tables: 1M (Tables: 78)
[--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17)
[--] Data in MEMORY tables: 1020K (Tables: 2)

you will see how much tables are in aria, myisam and innodb, what i was thinking about since my transition from phpbb to vbulletin some of my tables was automatically converted from myisam =to innodb.
So i was thinking the situation will apply here as well to convert the tables to aria to utilize MariaDB.
So i don't know if i'm wrong but i did notice a huge increase in speed when doing so.

"MariaDB uses by default the Aria storage engine for internal temporary files, instead of MyISAM. If you have a lot of temporary files, you should add and set aria-pagecache-buffer-size to the same value as you have for key-buffer-size. "
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/do...mysql_upgrade/

Why would you want to switch Databases if they both have just about the same features? MySQL has just been around for a lot longer (I think so anyway), so its a lot older and more mature.

Oh dear... MariaDB is superior for many reasons; MySQL is dying (kind of).

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL thus has everything that MySQL has plus more plus decent support and bug fixes.

See this for all the good reasons to switch:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=317249

Oh wow, really? I didn't know that. I will have to look into it, maybe I will switch also. Thanks for the info!