A big shoutout to the openSUSE team: openSUSE 11.3 has been released! And with it comes a choice for the database users out there – you can now choose between MySQL or MariaDB.
I wrote in February 2010 that MariaDB was in the unstable repository for openSUSE, and was informed by Michal that it would be included a little while ago. The version that is shipping is MariaDB 5.1.44, and why not give it a download?
So try it. Install via zypper in mariadb.