It Started With a Bug

When I was building VMMS — a voucher management system

for government offices — everything worked fine locally.

MySQL. Clean queries. Fast results.

Then I deployed to a server running MariaDB.

Half my charts broke.

The Problem

I had written date queries like this all over the codebase:

// This breaks on MariaDB DB :: table ( 'voucher_transactions' ) -> selectRaw ( 'MONTHNAME(created_at) as month, COUNT(*) as total' ) -> groupByRaw ( 'MONTH(created_at), MONTHNAME(created_at)' ) -> get ();

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MONTH() and MONTHNAME() are MySQL functions. They work

fine on MySQL but behave differently on MariaDB — especially

when combined with GROUP BY .

The result? Months showing up in the wrong order.

Duplicate entries. Missing data.

Why This Happens

MySQL and MariaDB have diverged over the years.…