How does Maria 1.5 Compare to MyISAM?
Maria 1.0 was basically a crash-safe non-transactional version of MyISAM. Maria 1.5 added more concurrency (multiple inserter) and some optimizations. Maria supports all aspects of MyISAM, except as noted below. This includes external and internal check/repair/compressing of rows, different row formats, different index compress formats, maria_check etc. After a normal shutdown one can copy Maria files between servers.