First, I believe that Oracle MySQL, Percona MySQL and SkySQL MySQL (MariaDB) are all great databases with their own merits. You should probably try all of them and see which one works best for you. Personally I like Percona Server, but all of them are good.

So why do we need ANOTHER fork when there are already three perfectly acceptable commercial forks?
a) Experimentation
b) Community Involvement
c) Serious feature/functionality divergence/disparity
d) Extensibility
e) Storage engines
f) OLAP focus

Experimentation:
There are a lot of interesting and useful things in the database world that are not possible in MySQL. Many of these features have been implemented as middleware or add-ons as third party tools, but they don't get wide adoption because they are not "built-in" to the database. Two good examples are Flexviews and Shard-Query. Other experiments and worklogs have …

First, I believe that Oracle MySQL, Percona MySQL and SkySQL MySQL (MariaDB) are all great databases with their own merits. You should probably try all of them and see which one works best for you. Personally I like Percona Server, but all of them are good.

So why do we need ANOTHER fork when there are already three perfectly acceptable commercial forks?
a) Experimentation
b) Community Involvement
c) Serious feature/functionality divergence/disparity
d) Extensibility
e) Storage engines
f) OLAP focus

Experimentation:
There are a lot of interesting and useful things in the database world that are not possible in MySQL. Many of these features have been implemented as middleware or add-ons as third party tools, but they don't get wide adoption because they are not "built-in" to the database. Two good examples are Flexviews and Shard-Query. Other experiments and worklogs have …