maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Colin Charles <colin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

On 16 Feb 2012, at 07:57, Henrik Ingo wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Fabio T. Leitao
> <fabio.tleitao@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> For those who have not followed this up closely, a little history.
>> 
>> Remember that MariaDB is not just "compatible" with MySQL, but it kind of IS
>> MySQL, forked and re-branded.
>> 
>> In 2009, even before Oracle has purchased Sun, Monty Widenius (one of the
>> original creators of MySQL and architects) has left the Sun (than the owner
>> of MySQL) and started MariaDB, intended as a replacement for the full MySQL
>> server.
>> 
>> It seems that since that, most of the MySQL developers left and joined
>> either Drizzle or MariaDB. Drizzle is another fork, but was targeted to a
>> “limited but important market”, created by Brian Aker almost the same time
>> when MySQL was bought by Sun (back in 2008)
>> 
> 
> Hi Fabio
> 
> You contributed a fairly good history, so it inspired me to fill in
> missing pieces.
> 
> There is also a fourth MySQL fork: Percona Server. It is interesting
> to note people in this thread and in general the Linux distro people
> seem to omit this when talking about MySQL forks. As far as I'm aware
> it is the most popular of the forks (after MySQL itself), and used by
> many demanding Percona customers, especially the big and sexy Web
> companies (but not only).

I don't think this is a fair statement as MariaDB also has many popular users out there. Let's not make this a popularity contest either

> Out of these four it should first be mentioned that Drizzle is not at
> all a compatible fork of MySQL. Some would say the things that are not
> compatible are enhancements :-) But nevertheless, while Drizzle feels
> very familiar to a MySQL user, you couldn't take away MySQL, drop in
> Drizzle and expect that nobody would notice.

Nobody? WordPress users for example, might (see: https://launchpad.net/wordpress-drizzle a plugin that you will require). I think there's a Drupal patch that's almost quite ready also...

> Personally I think the main benefit of Percona Server is that they
> have a 5.5 version out there for some time - exactly a year ago it
> seems! While MariaDB has focused more on their own work (and perhaps
> also therefore the merge effort for them is much larger) they haven't
> yet produced a 5.5 release (even alpha). This should be taken into
> account, since many MySQL users already use MySQL 5.5 and features
> like semi-sync replication, they would consider MariaDB a downgrade.

MariaDB 5.5 beta should be out by the end of this month. It will not be GA in time for the LTS release, but it will be out soon (its worth noting that all these discussions is what has put the team to work on milestones in a quicker fashion). It will also include all enhancements up to MariaDB 5.3 naturally, so you get all the improvements that come with it

What should also be taken into consideration is support for an existing GA release. I've asked Percona (Stewart Smith, Director, Server Development) what the plans are and generally Percona will officially support 2 GA releases just like Oracle. Unless a customer asks for it, there wouldn't be a fix. LTS releases might I remind you need 5 years of support.  Percona Server 5.1 will remain supported till Percona Server 5.6 is released, and beyond that, its just a customer request possibly. There is no defined policy yet to be fair

> The other strong advantage Percona has at the moment is their recent
> adoption of Galera clustering technology (see Percona XtraDB Cluster).
> This is a revolutionary technology when it comes to High-Availability
> with MySQL and even scalability of MySQL. In fact it has many of the
> good properties seen in many NoSQL solutions (but is still good old
> SQL, Galera is just about the clustering). I'm personally a big fan of
> Galera and don't intend to use anything else going forward.

This alpha feature is very interesting, but the idea of having a 3-node cluster pitches this as a NDB replacement rather than just a MySQL replacement. But as an aside, I do agree with you - I am totally stoked with the Galera technology coming out of Codership!

	cheers,
	-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/