What API development services do you offer?

We offer REST API development, GraphQL APIs, third-party API integration, Laravel API development, and API security implementation. We also provide DevOps services including AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

Where are you based and do you work with clients across the UK?

We're based in Leeds, West Yorkshire, but we work with clients across the entire United Kingdom including London, Manchester, Birmingham, and beyond. We work remotely with businesses throughout Britain.

What technologies do you specialise in?

We specialise in Laravel and PHP for backend development, along with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, Node.js, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CloudFlare. We also work with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Do you provide ongoing support after project completion?

Yes, we offer ongoing support and maintenance packages to ensure your APIs and applications continue running smoothly. This includes monitoring, updates, security patches, and performance optimisation.

Why We Use MariaDB Over MySQL, Even in 2026

If you have ever spun up a Laravel project and reached for a database, you have probably asked yourself: MySQL or MariaDB? They look almost identical. The connection config is the same. Eloquent does not care. So why does it matter?

At The API Guys, we default to MariaDB on every project. Here is why.

A Quick Bit of History

MariaDB was created in 2009 by the original developers of MySQL, who forked the project after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems - and with it, MySQL. The concern was straightforward: would Oracle keep MySQL truly open source, or would enterprise features gradually slip behind a commercial licence? MariaDB was the community's insurance policy.

More than fifteen years later, that concern has not entirely gone away. MySQL remains open source under the GPL, but Oracle's stewardship has seen the pace of community-facing feature development slow, with certain capabilities - such as thread pooling - only available in the paid Enterprise edition. MariaDB, by contrast, ships those features in the open source release as standard.

What Actually Differs in Practice

For most CRUD-heavy Laravel APIs, the day-to-day difference is small. Both databases speak the same SQL dialect, share the same InnoDB storage engine, and work with Eloquent without any changes to your application code. The gaps emerge when you push further.

Thread pooling is included in MariaDB's community release. Under high concurrency, this reduces the overhead of managing large numbers of simultaneous connections - something MySQL only offers in its Enterprise tier.

View optimisation is another area where MariaDB edges ahead. When you query a database view, MariaDB is smart enough to only touch the underlying tables that the query actually needs. MySQL queries all referenced tables regardless.

Temporal tables (system-versioned tables) have been part of MariaDB since version 10.3. They let you automatically track the full history of any row's changes - useful for audit trails in regulated industries or simply for debugging data anomalies in production without having to dig through logs.

Storage engine flexibility is broader in MariaDB. While InnoDB remains the default for both, MariaDB also ships with Aria (a crash-safe alternative to MyISAM) and MyRocks (optimised for SSD and high compression workloads). These are niche, but having the option matters on certain infrastructure setups.

Laravel's Own Endorsement

From Laravel 11 onwards, the framework ships a dedicated mariadb database driver, separate from the mysql driver it previously piggy-backed on. This is not a minor detail - it signals that the Laravel team considers MariaDB a first-class supported database, not just a MySQL alternative. The dedicated driver enables MariaDB-specific behaviour, such as native UUID column types rather than the char(36) fallback used under the MySQL driver.

To use it, you simply set your database connection driver in config/database.php:

'driver' => 'mariadb',

Laravel Herd also ships with MariaDB as its local database option, reinforcing that this is now the expected choice in the Laravel ecosystem for MySQL-compatible workloads.

Licensing and Long-Term Trust

The MariaDB Foundation guarantees that MariaDB Server will remain free and open source under the GPL, independent of any commercial entity. That is a structural commitment, not just a policy statement. For clients building long-term products, we consider this a meaningful advantage over a database whose roadmap is ultimately determined by Oracle's commercial priorities.

It also means no unexpected licensing conversations further down the line - something that has tripped up more than a few teams who assumed the MySQL Community Edition covered their use case entirely.

Our Default Stack

On every new Laravel project we spin up, we select MariaDB. Combined with Ubuntu servers, Cloudflare for edge protection, and Redis for caching, it forms a stable and well-understood foundation that we can operate confidently on behalf of clients.

If you are building a new Laravel application and are still defaulting to MySQL out of habit, it is worth reconsidering. The migration path from MySQL to MariaDB is straightforward - in most cases it is a drop-in swap - and you gain thread pooling, a more actively developed open source codebase, and native support in Laravel's own tooling.

If you want to talk through your database architecture or get a second opinion on your current stack, get in touch with the team.