What a coincidence! Just today, Slackware also switched to MariaDB! [1]. Two weeks ago, it was openSUSE [2]. It's on the cards for the next Fedora release in May [3]. Wonder when will Debian (and its children) make the switch.

[1]: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Slackware-Linux-switc...

[2]: http://blog.mariadb.org/opensuse-12-3-released-with-mariadb-...

[3]: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Fedora-19-MariaDB-ins...

It's a pretty tricky business buying an open source company. You have to work with the community and existing people to maintain "master" of it. Oracle of course is not that company and so their subacquisition of mysql via Sun is now being pissed away in its entirety. If I were an investor I might have some questions.

*Edit: Sun dropped $1 billion on mysql. That's a lot of money to later just "lose"

Looking at the specs for MariaDB, I can see why our last client dropped MySQL for the front end and went with it.

The XtraDB engine, basically a fork of InnoDB with patches, is actually very nice. We've had to do almost no modifications to the data structure when moving from InnoDB for some DBs (that we're not using Postgres for).

Fun fact: XtraDB is also the default in Percona http://www.percona.com (No, I don't work for them).

There are things you still need to carefully look into before migration if that's what you want to do. Minor things like naming is only part of it. Read. Read. Re-read the documentation : https://mariadb.org/docs

I've felt MairaDB is the direction MySQL should have gone after the 4.x branch. In many ways (though the technical aspects are totally different), this split is very similar to what happened with FreeBSD after the 4.x branch with the start of DragonFly. When in doubt, fork.

The beauty of Open Source.

That said, if you can, use PostgreSQL for the good of your head. Transactional schema migrations mean you can save yourself a lot of headache.

My favorite comment from the comparison page

https://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-vs-mysql-compatibility/

"Timings may be different as MariaDB is in many cases faster than MySQL. "

I'm hardly a DB expert, but I would have thought Percona would make more sense to replace Oracle MySQL in the repository. True it doesn't have a few new bells, but it should be a drop-in replacement for pretty much everyone.

For any arch'ers looking to upgrade, note that "mysql_upgrade -p" can take a long time depending on how much data you have in MySQL. It took a few minutes on my laptop with only a few medium sized databases.

Interesting performance comparison here between MariaDB, Percona Server, and MySQL http://vbtechsupport.com/657/2/

I went to Open Database camp a few weeks ago. There was a talk about the split...

The short story: MariaDB is a fork of MySQL done by Michael "Monty" Widenius one of the mySQL founders.

It seems the winds of fear are blowing against mySQL and MariaDB is getting mindshare (it is a fork so pretty close still but not going back). Although Oracle hasn't really done anything yet, and did send a rep to the conference, there seems to be some distrust.

About a decade ago at a startup we had and Oracle instance running s a test, their sales people where tenacious (fought them off by asking for an ODBC driver for linux). Then startup went under. sigh.

Hopefully Ubuntu makes a similar switch in the near future. Long overdue at this point.

The interesting part about this is that MariaDB is only a drop in replacement for MySQL 5.5. MariaDB isn't porting to MySQL 5.6 (which came out last month), instead they are going to try to reimplement all of the functionality from MySQL 5.6 which will probably never finish:

http://blog.mariadb.org/mariadb-10-0-and-mysql-5-6/

Slackware is doing this too.

How easy is it to switch a production environment (millions of users, TBs of data) from MySQL to MariaDB?

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Is MariaDB Galeria Cluster mostly-the-same as MySQL Cluster?

The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

Considering that MySQL is in the running for worst database ever coded. I realy dont give a shit what fork ARCH LINUX chooses. Since I wouldnt use that bullshit either,

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