To put the topics of this book into practice, we need a personal computer running any operating system supported by MariaDB: Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, or Windows. Linux is preferred because this system is most used for MariaDB and the book focuses on it. However, the commands should run unmodified on any Unix system; Windows is also mentioned where necessary.

MariaDB and MariaDB Galera Cluster can be downloaded from MariaDB's official site. The required third-party software is available on the sites mentioned in the relevant chapters. The mentioned system commands should be included in all the Linux distributions.