I really like the direct DB to filesystem mappings of the MyISAM engine in MySql. A database is simply a directory. A table is simply 3 files in that directory:

    - One for the structure
    - One for the data 
    - One for the indexes

You can simply copy a MyISAM database by copying the directory (while the MySql server is stopped).

MariaDB has forked the MyISAM engine and created the Aria engine. It is a crash safe version of MyISAM and is now their default engine for all system tables.

So in contrast to MySql, you can completely disable InnoDB in MariaDB. MySql does not support that anymore as their system tables are InnoDB.

Especially for non-concurrency workloads, MyISAM and Aria are super fast.

For these reasons, I really like MariaDB.