Aria is a storage engine for the MariaDB and MySQL relational database management systems.
[1] Aria is used for internal temporary tables in MariaDB, a community-developed branch of the MySQL database led by Widenius.
Aria was initially named "Maria", as a reference to Monty's youngest child.
[2] It was renamed Aria in 2010 to avoid confusion with the main database it is developed for, MariaDB.
[3] Chris Tooley, who won a contest to suggest the name, wrote, "Aria is Maria without the 'M'; also it is a pleasant musical term.