Installing MariaDB

Docker

A handy and cross platform option is to run MariaDB inside Docker, see Installing and using MariaDB via Docker. The downside of the Docker approach is you do not get the client side command line utilities on your machine.

macOS

You can install MariaDB on a Mac via a package, see Installing MariaDB Server PKG packages on macOS for details. However I would recommend the Homebrew route as documented at Installing MariaDB Server on macOS Using Homebrew.

Windows

There is an MSI installer available from Downloads - MariaDB but do take care to get the stable release, it is the one at the top of the page, then read Installing MariaDB MSI Packages on Windows - MariaDB Knowledge Base for some help with the installer. The Zip files are just a file archive and do not contain an installer. Make sure you select "Use UTF8 as default server's character set" during the installation so that the default is "utf8_general_ci", otherwise you will get "latin1_swedish_ci" as the default. I would also recommend not installing HeidiSQL via the MariaDB installer as if you update to the latest it will not replace it but install it in addition, so if you want HeidiSQL then go to HeidiSQL - MariaDB, MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL made easy.