**** UPDATE March 2022 **** I have used this module/driver on a number of Drupal 9.3.x sites and can confirm that this works absolutely fine with no issues.
As Drupal 8 is now end of life, to ensure you keep up to date with Drupal you now need to upgrade or install Drupal 9. If you are running a slightly older server and your server is running MariaDB 10.0, 10.1 or 10.2 Drupal will not install or if you upgrade you are left with a warning message in Drupal status report telling you that the database version is incompatible with Drupal 9. Well if you have updated you will find quickly that Drupal 9 runs perfectly well on MariaDB 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2.
To overcome this, just run the following composer command at your Drupal root directory to install the database driver for Drupal 9:
composer require drupal/mysql56
Then add this or update your settings.php file to this:
$databases['default']['default'] = array (
'database' => 'databasename',
'username' => 'databaseusername',
'password' => 'dbpassword',
'prefix' => '',
'host' => 'localhost',
'port' => '3306',
'namespace' => 'Drupal\\mysql56\\Driver\\Database\\mysql',
'driver' => 'mysql',
);
This database driver lets you install and use Drupal 9 (9.0, 9.1, or 9.2) on MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 and up. MySQL 5.6, MariaDB 10.0, and MariaDB 10.1 are all past their EOL dates, so it has not yet been determined whether this driver will be supported for Drupal 9.3.
More info here: https://www.drupal.org/project/mysql56
If you end up updating your server to MariaDB 10.3+ you can then reset the database driver to use Drupal's default one by changing the settings.php file back to:
$databases['default']['default'] = array (
'database' => 'databasename',
'username' => 'databaseusername',
'password' => 'dbpassword',
'prefix' => '',
'host' => 'localhost',
'port' => '3306',
'namespace' => 'Drupal\\Core\\Database\\Driver\\mysql',
'driver' => 'mysql',
);
Note that just the namespace line is being changed here to point to the mysql56 driver we installed using composer.
**** UPDATE **** I have used this module/driver on a number of Drupal 9.3.x sites and can confirm that this works absolutely fine with no issues.