the company i work for is considering for multiple reasons (some of them libked to the politics of open source and oracle) a switch from MySQL to Mariadb. Our development team has been using Zend Server (now it's 6th version) which always install mysql. Is it possible to switch from mySQl to Mariadb smoothly? are there any hurdles that we should be aware of ahead of time? The OS for every development computer is Ubuntu 13.04 at this point.
No, there should be no more issues than when upgrading to a new MySQL version.