maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Arjen Lentz <arjen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Colin

On 09/12/2010, at 5:24 PM, Colin Charles wrote:
> In February 2010, we released MariaDB 5.1. In November 2010, we  
> released MariaDB 5.2. In a span of those months, we've seen a 4x  
> increase in downloads of MariaDB. I've heard many stories of people  
> running it on their blog, and there are people running it on single  
> server instances. I myself run it on about six servers of mine in  
> production... And Daniel will attest to running all the Monty  
> Program infrastructure on MariaDB :)
>
> I'm curious to know where MariaDB is going. Where its getting  
> installed. Are only software developers playing with it, or is it  
> getting into production environments?
>
> Please don't hesitate to discuss it here on the maria-discuss  
> mailing list so we can all get a better idea of where MariaDB is  
> being used. If its being used in "secretive" environments, don't  
> hesitate to drop me a private email


As publically stated and known, Open Query uses MariaDB as its server  
of choice for deployments of 5.1 and above.
Clients are definitely allowed to use a stock MySQL 5.1, or another  
flavour, but generally they choose to go MariaDB for a variety of  
reasons including being more up to date (compared to stock distro  
versions), availability of DEB packages (Debian/Ubuntu), the  
additional instrumentation, and so on - essentially the same reasons  
OurDelta builds existed for 5.0.

So "hell yea" it's seeing production, and that includes big fish such  
as online retailers and broadcasters (Australia's SBS Broadcasting  
world (soccer) cup environment was entirely MariaDB 5.1) as well as a  
variety of smaller but no less critical deployments.
The most common setup is dual masters with MMM and generally 2+  
slaves, although there are some "plain dual masters" cases which I've  
recently written about on the OQ blog (the cache preload story).

We haven't had any issues, that is, other than encountering some bugs  
that also exist in stock MySQL.


We've been looking in to using PBXT for some specific workloads (such  
as sustained high volume write environments) and clients are quite  
serious about that and pretty happy so far as we gain understanding of  
how PBXT works. Similarly, people are experimenting with the OQGraph  
engine in 5.2, and we see modules pop up for various languages and  
environments that specifically utilise it. For both engines, it's  
quite clearly the case that "ease of deployment" by just having them  
available with the server greatly helps their uptake - it might even  
be considered critical to that, possibly a lesson for other engines.

We have deployments that use 5.0 OurDelta which includes the Sphinx  
storage engine; they'll be skipping straight to MariaDB 5.2 since  
that's the only next release that also supports this engine. Naturally  
that's a pretty big step so it involves extra diligence, but it is  
happening.


Regards,
Arjen.
--
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Remote expertise & maintenance for MySQL/MariaDB server environments.

Follow us at http://openquery.com/blog/ & http://twitter.com/openquery