Recently I've been trying to get some hands-on experience with the amorphous cloud offering that is Microsoft Azure. Among the services I've been testing is the Azure Database for MariaDB server which provides a dedicated, resilient database server instance without the bother of setting up and managing a VM or dealing with replication etc.

Once configured, the documentation explains how to connect to the server with MySQL Workbench, a popular free GUI client. This all worked fine, but for many years my GUI of choice has been Navicat. It's not free but I've found it well worth the license in terms of ease-of-use.

However, when I tried to connect to my Azure MariaDB instance, using exactly the same details as the MySQL Workbench connection, it failed with the error "This is not a MariaDB server".

I should add that I'm using the MySQL version of Navicat rather than the premium product which allows connections to a range of database types, but it does also support MariaDB. Although the two database products are very similar, you do need to tell Navicat which type you want to connect to, and obviously I selected MariaDB, as I normally do when connecting to my non-cloud hosted Maria instances.

It seems though that Navicat has trouble recognizing Azure's server as MariaDB, even though that is clearly what it is.

The solution is simple: choose MySQL as the server type instead of MariaDB.