Migrating to MariaDB and PHP 7.0 (XAMPP)

Hello
I've just climbed out from under my rock...
and have set up the latest XAMPP stack  (on my Windows dev box) and discovered that, besides using PHP 7.0.6,  there's an open source MariaDB that is replacing the (Oracle-related) MySQL engine.
Like I said... I've been under a rock.

I do ALL my db work in TBS using Skrol29's truly amazing TBSSQL database plugin - so I was concerned whether the supposedly transparent MariaDB switch over combined with the PHP 7 upgrade would blow up my code base.

Anyway, I started testing to see where my various apps stand in this new environment.

So far the only minor glitch was the tbssql_mysql.php  connector. It throws a fatal mysql_ping() function error (the mysql_ping() now eliminated from PHP 7) So I switched to the tbssql_mysqli.php connector and all is well again. No code changes for either the PHP 7 or the MariaDB.

If anyone has found other issues, I'd appreciate hearing about what's breaking and your fixes/workarounds.

Thanks for TBS and TbsSQL every day.
Cheers,
TomH