I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this article you’ve at least heard of MariaDB. Heck, maybe you’ve even used it at some point. But, if not, I highly recommend that you give it a quick glance as, at the highest level, it’s a pretty solid, free (yea, free) open-source database solution that you can use for anything from some lightweight tinkering to supporting fully-fledged, production-grade applications.
Tip: If you'd like to jump right into a MariaDB database and use the same dataset in this article be sure to check out this MariaDB JSON Quickstart Guide!