Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB

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217 pointsTsiolkovsky75 comments

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.

Did you also change the storage engine for a better fit with your data?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So they kept the money and the legacy of the product. Surely Oracle considered this option? Could have they done anything to prevent such forks?

he had to stay on at oracle for a year

"He" who? Monty was already gone when Oracle bought Sun.

yeah, I meant Sun

same thing ;p

Putting real effort into developing an awesome product. Then nobody would have seen the need for a fork.

Of course they are afraid of cannibalizing their other overpriced stuff. So they wanted to let it die a slow and painful death.

In he grand scheme of things getting rid of the pesky competitor MySQL was only an afterthought in the decision to buy Sun, that was probably driven by the legal department.

Also Oracle is pretty strong in the corporate Java space and has some great products there.

So MySQL did never get the attention it deserved and needed to thrive.

> Also Oracle is pretty strong in the corporate Java space and has some great products there.

And by great do you mean "fucking awful albeit reliable"? That's always how I saw Oracle products. A pain at every turn, but it works.

Last I heard, that's why Oracle developers earn more than most: No one wants to do it.

The original purchaser was Sun and they presumably bought it, in part, to compete with Oracle in the lower-end market, to ensure MySQL runs well on Sun hardware (which, in turn, sells more hardware), to sell MySQL related support and professional services and so on.

Not long after this, Oracle acquired Sun and along with it, MySQL. One of the MySQL founders didn't like this and started a fork of MySQL, based on the GPL'ed source. There's not a great deal Oracle could have done about this. But they weren't just buying MySQL, they were buying all of Sun. Additionally, the fork wasn't exactly a commercial threat for years - it's only now that we're starting to see movement towards adoption of MariaDB by high-profile, large users.

> Not long after this, Oracle acquired Sun and along with it, MySQL. One of the MySQL founders didn't like this and started a fork of MySQL, based on the GPL'ed source.

Based on his constant whining BEFORE the Oracle purchase, that guy would have ended up starting a fork anyhow.

Oracle didn't buy Sun for a database engine, they bought them for Java and Solaris.

Business decisions like that are why Sun went bankrupt. For their $1bn they bought only the domain name mysql.com, and Monty was all over the Intermet slagging them off too.

FWIW the only way MySQL was usable for real work was InnoDB, which was an Oracle product too.

Oracle also has a commercial license for MySQL, which customers can buy to enable them to embed MySQL into their closed-source product. The Monty Program cannot license MariaDB as anything other than the GPL.

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.

They have a shot at the ole' open source hat trick: Sell the same company to the same company twice for $1 billion.

> 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.

> given their small user base

All the distros are switching to MariaDB.

... Which means nothing in and of itself. Where's the money coming from? If you say nothing else for Oracle, say that they know where their bread's buttered.

When we first started to worry about mysql, we looked at the alternatives and chose Percona. However, if this is in the base repo...

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.

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 :)

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'.

In somewhat related news, I wonder how much longer MariaDB will be a "free for all" given Monty's view on open source and open development seems to have changed:

Fluffy summary:

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/31/mysql-co-founder-wants-you-t...

Original interview:

http://www.zdnet.com/open-source-its-true-cost-and-where-its...

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.

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.

They've announced [1] that RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18. Based on the package updates list for mongodb [2], it looks like it will using MongoDB version around 2.2.4. The source should be available via Fedora's normal repos.

[1]: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Red-Hat-s-RHEL-7-roadm... [2]: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/mongodb

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.

Twitter uses MySQL for all their data. They forked it and made tons of improvements. Here's their blog https://blog.twitter.com/2012/mysql-twitter and here's the project https://github.com/twitter/mysql

That's a fork, not sure it counts as using mysql unless they largely follow upstream...

Do the current 3rd party tools work with MariaDB - SqlYog, etc.?

SqlYog does, not sure about other tools.

When Monty was asked this question during one conference, he recomended HeidiSQL http://www.heidisql.com/

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/

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.

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? ;-)

also MaxDB was named after his son

This seems to be a trend! Lets just hope there's not a kid walking around called 'Couch'

Or 'Mongo', for that matter.

"Mongo only pawn in game of life"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKRma7PDW10

lol

I wonder how My feels right now?

Oh My. What a question.

At being slower than Maria? Or being completely interchangeable with her? Family dinners must be awkward :)

On the other hand, both Maria and My are going to be celebrities at any computer science department/startup incubator.

It was somebody's ex-wife who was named Gre.

(Nice joke) But - not true! from the wiki: "The name refers to the project's origins as a "post-Ingres" database, being a development from University Ingres DBMS (Ingres being an abbreviation for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System)." more history can be found at http://www.postgresql.org/about/history/

Not judging the book by it's cover, but MariaDB doesn't do the DB any justice with this crappy name.

What's wrong with the name?

As opposed to MySql? Sounds like sound kind of toy database.

The nice thing is that they are just named after Monty's kids, from what I remember from an interview on FLOSS weekly.

Oh, I get it! Is it "MySQL" -> "my sequel" -> "my child" -> "Maria"? That's quite clever! :)

You're over thinking things. :) He literally has a daughter named "My" and another daughter called "Maria".

> "my sequel" -> "my child"

Ha! Never thought of that. But it is simpler than that. His daughters are named My and Maria.

Oh, darnit! :) Thanks, though.

GreenPlum is plenty successful. I doubt the name matters too much.

iOS, iPad, iPod, iMac, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Cybershot, Vista, Wii (children smirk), XBoxOne (didn't we have an XBox 1?), are all pretty shitty names. I can even remember thinking that Google was a toy name when I first heard it. So doesn't matter that much - over time you ignore them. On the flip side, I loved the name Bing until MS used it, I feel uneasy each time I hear it.

Dude, I have to ask, what is NOT a shitty name in your world?

I think some of those brand names were pretty good (the original XBox, iPod too).

Good question - sorry to come over as negative! Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, XBox (I only think the new name is misleading), Playstation (though it does sound like a childs play area - which I guess it is...), Oracle, Sun, Apple, Mac (this one is weird, Macintosh??, the abbreviation is short for friend or nice drink), Trillian, Xerox (a bit dated - but different), Knoppix, Debian (I like name inspired ones), OCP, Acorn, MSX (original XBox?), Dragon, Spectrum, Spectre, OpenSource, Ubuntu, Redhat/Fedora, Suse (brain is struggling now), Hobnob, Jaffacake, Pathe, Universal, Pegasus, Mercury messenger, Kindle, Nook, Monster Munch, Twiglets, Suma, Pot noodle, Marmite, Oat Crunchies, Audi, Honda, Kia, Lotus, Epic, The Who, The Fall, The The - sure there are loads more, but can't think of them off the top of my head.

(I guess it was clever of Flickr, to do something at least different, but the other web2.0 wannabe names feel like second rate copy cats.)

Ya, I don't like the name either, I think he named it after his kid?

Yes, well, he named MySQL after a daughter called My, too.

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.

I don't think Oracle is the easiest to pronounce because of the c + l. There are certainly better names. DB2 is a simple one. Nothing fancy of fuzzy about it.

If you want a word then, how about Firebird.

"Firebird" is non-trivial outside of english and it doesn't mean anything. Most European languages at least have a word that not only sounds a bit like "Oracle" but also means the same thing.

I agree that DB2 is fairly simple and to the point.

> "Firebird" is non-trivial outside of english

What? I can imagine it is in a few languages, but not in any where "Oracle" is trivial.

And it does have a meaning, even if it isn't related to databases. "Oracle" is a bit clever that way.

cl in Spanish (clave), French (clef), Italian (, Catalan (clau), etc is a trivial pronunciation if is pronounced not like an English word. And the English pronunciation (kel) is even easier

Firebird is complicated.

By the way, oracle in Catalan or French is oracle

How about BigTable ? Since it's uhm essentially a big table.

When is DB3 coming out?

Yeah, it's better than Oracle, but I forgot about it because I haven't heard of anyone using it recently? Btw, who uses Firebird and what does it have over Postgres, SQLServer or Oracle?

Both MariaDB and MySQL are named after Monty's daughters. He has a daughter named Maria and a daughter named My.

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.

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.

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