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Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB

217 points| Tsiolkovsky | 12 years ago |itwire.com | reply

75 comments

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[+] easy_rider|12 years ago|reply
I also dumped MySQL and started using and recommending MariaDB in production since i've seen it resolve a lot of my hard fought battles with super complex nested joins and index overloads. Queries that took 4.5s went to 450ms just by dropping in this beauty. From then on I was on the bandwagon. Slow Wordpress site with a ton of plugins that tries to solve everything? Now it can do it within a timeframe thats acceptable. Ok your bottlenecks will still be there somewhat.. abeit less apparent. But it just is faster and scales way more predictable imo with hardware adapted configs.
[+] rz2k|12 years ago|reply
Did you also change the storage engine for a better fit with your data?
[+] fhd2|12 years ago|reply
It's pretty similar to the Hudson/Jenkins situation (also something acquired by Oracle). Kind of sad when the original author has to fork his own project to keep evolving it, but I'm glad they're apparently able to take a considerable amount of users with them.

We also switched to MariaDB in production a while ago. Was absolutely seamless.

[+] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
Kind of sad when the original author has to fork his own project But pretty awesome that Free Software gives him (or her) the right to do so. It used to be you abandoned your code when acquired.
[+] oblio|12 years ago|reply
For Jenkins - they took almost all the users. I doubt we'll hear much about Hudson in 5 years time, unless something major happens. I think only Oracle, Sonatype and a handful of other companies are using Hudson these days. All the companies I know have migrated to Jenkins.
[+] JimmaDaRustla|12 years ago|reply
Not surprising since MariaDB is a drop in replacement for MySQL; daemon names don't even change.

Not sure how the original developers can create a fork of a product they sold for 1 billion? Oh well, better in their hands than Oracle's.

[+] leef|12 years ago|reply
> Oh well, better in their hands than Oracle's.

One might think that but it has surprisingly not been true.

Oracle, already the owner of InnoDB, now owning the entirety of mysql has been able to stop fighting with Sun and push out awesome features at a high rate. Just to name a few since Oracle took over:

* Big performance improvements for multi-core.

* Performance Schema

* Full-text engine for InnoDB

* Thread pools

* Improved support for SSD

* Online schema updates

MariaDB forked at 5.5 and is going to be missing lots of really nice features. They can back port some of it but they aren't going to be able to keep up very well. They have their own implementation of some of these features which, given their small user base, I do not trust as much as the versions implemented in MySQL proper.

Also given that MariaDB was forced to merge with SkySQL to survive I just don't see a bright future for MariaDB as long as Oracle continues to improve MySQL like it has been.

[+] glurgh|12 years ago|reply
Not sure how the original developers can create a fork of a product they sold for 1 billion?

Product was GPL licensed. For many years before Oracle bought it.

[+] eksith|12 years ago|reply
Oracle didn't buy the product. They bought the name and the product was a nice extra. Likewise Oracle didn't really buy Java; they bought Sun and Java just happened to be a nice extra.

I've heard people say this was like what Cisco tried to do with Linksys by trying to get into consumer and SMB. Plus we know from Cisco what happens when you buy a brand and let it stagnate.

Buying MySQL for Oracle, I think, wasn't really a matter of creating a new foothold in the hobby/SMB market or the like. Bringing it under their name was about adding value to their own brand. "Look, we cater to the 'small' guys too!" (And that's however arbitrarily people define 'small' since Adwords clearly doesn't fit the label.) If it was somehow about gaining a foothold, I think that was secondary. And maybe it was their way of somehow muscling in on Postgres in that aspect.

Of course people will only continue to use a product if you show it some love. Freshly harvested fruit has a limited shelf life after all.

[+] Aqueous|12 years ago|reply
They have a shot at the ole' open source hat trick: Sell the same company to the same company twice for $1 billion.
[+] lotsofcows|12 years ago|reply
When we first started to worry about mysql, we looked at the alternatives and chose Percona. However, if this is in the base repo...
[+] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
Percona are part of the MariaDB foundation, though so far they still seem to be based off of Oracle's MySQL sources.

Red Hat's announcement wasn't much of a surprise (Fedora had adopted MariaDB some time ago, as has most of the rest of the known universe). A lot of enterprises rely on Percona for support and consulting, however, and should they make a switch, that's likely lights-out for MySQL. Though there's a low probability Oracle would consider transferring the name to a community foundation outside its control (the codebase really doesn't matter as it's GPLd) and the name could continue forward.

It's a pretty powerful message of how branding isn't the end-all in Free Software.

[+] druiid|12 years ago|reply
Basically we have chosen Percona to by our MySQL 'base'. Essentially even if they switch to MariaDB as the core I can expect a seamless transition and support to back it up if needed. Essentially if the crap ever truly hits the fan with Percona solutions they can charge us for some hours. If the same happens with MariaDB it's pretty much 'me'.
[+] easy_rider|12 years ago|reply
I also looked at percorna before even knowing about MariaDB. I ended up picking MariaDB because it solved more of the issues that I currently had in a codebase that I simply did not get the resources for to get refactored in a way. Also in comparison to Pecorna, you also get Aria, which aims to be a transactional/non-transactional replacement for MyISAM. Can't wait for that moment :)
[+] JeremyMorgan|12 years ago|reply
The move from MySQL to MariaDB is one of the easiest decisions an admin can make. I expect it to obliterate MySQL in short time.
[+] sturadnidge|12 years ago|reply
Also mentions MongoDB making it into RHEL 7... pretty interesting as well, although I can't seem to find any other sources for that currently.
[+] josephlord|12 years ago|reply
The interesting question at this point is who is still using MySQL rather than one of the alternatives?

I'm sure there are many that use the distribution default but I wonder if anyone is actively choosing MySQL still.

[+] chiph|12 years ago|reply
Do the current 3rd party tools work with MariaDB - SqlYog, etc.?
[+] sehrope|12 years ago|reply
Yes existing MySQL tooling works with MariaDB. The wire protocol is still the same so existing MySQL drivers work to connect to MariaDB as well.

The reverse situation is also useful. The MariaDB client drivers can connect to both MariaDB and MySQL instances yet are licensed LGPL (vs GPL for the MySQL client drivers) which is great for closed source commercial products (and general license compatibility).

We use it in the in house deployed version of our product (database client in your browser[1]) and will be switching the cloud hosted version over to it soon as well. No issues with it so far.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/

[+] bunwich|12 years ago|reply
I tried MySQL Workbench and it does not fully work with MariaDB. Using some of the GUI actions would cause it to spin and not return any results.
[+] tyree732|12 years ago|reply
SqlYog does, not sure about other tools.
[+] ciderpunx|12 years ago|reply
I use MariaDB in production. It was totally trivial to drop it in as a MySQL replacement and usually gets slightly better performance. Not to mention not relying on Oracle who one can imagine might not want to give MySQL as much love as it needs given their other database. So I can see why Redhat would want to do that.

As for the name, MySQL was named after Monty's daughter My. MariaDB was named after another daughter Maria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius). I think its sort of sweet. Maybe someone has a kid called Postgre? ;-)

[+] dorfsmay|12 years ago|reply
It was somebody's ex-wife who was named Gre.
[+] selectnull|12 years ago|reply
I wonder how My feels right now?
[+] riffraff|12 years ago|reply
also MaxDB was named after his son
[+] tzaman|12 years ago|reply
Not judging the book by it's cover, but MariaDB doesn't do the DB any justice with this crappy name.
[+] nnq|12 years ago|reply
yeah, they should've chosen something more pronounceable, like "PostgreSQL" </sarcasm> ...seriously now, the only db with a "decent" name (easy to pronounce, nice sounding and actually meaningful) is Oracle, and maybe this was a reason for their success.
[+] yen223|12 years ago|reply
What's wrong with the name?
[+] clhodapp|12 years ago|reply
Both MariaDB and MySQL are named after Monty's daughters. He has a daughter named Maria and a daughter named My.
[+] ollysb|12 years ago|reply
As opposed to MySql? Sounds like sound kind of toy database.
[+] JimmaDaRustla|12 years ago|reply
Ya, I don't like the name either, I think he named it after his kid?
[+] shrikant|12 years ago|reply
GreenPlum is plenty successful. I doubt the name matters too much.
[+] dschiptsov|12 years ago|reply
It is not that MariaDB is any better, it is that Oracle is much bigger.)

Edit: It is all about InnoDB engine, which is now developed and fixed by Oracle. Others, notably Percona, have its own set of patches which adds some features to what Oracle releases, while MariaDB is mostly re-branding.

[+] mathnode|12 years ago|reply
MariaDB right now has working Multi-Source replication and GTID failover in the MariaDB 10.0.3+ alphas.

They are also working on a new table discovery engine, which will bring Transactional DDL to MariaDB, this to me makes MariaDB far more superior to MySQL. They are innovating, and they are open about it. https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-3808

Oracle have only innovated on the niggles of Mysql, like the unencrypted ~/.my.cnf files to appease their "Enterprise" customers.