Comment 27 for bug 1437846

I've had similar problems. It seems to me that the default Akonadi options for MySQL include a table_cache parameter, but it's been deprecated since 5.1 and in 5.6 prevents a start of the database. Removing this options did the trick for me.

In MariaDB documentation there's a remark that "all versions of MariaDB are based on MySQL 5.1 and greater, thus the table_cache option is deprecated in favor of table_open_cache."