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Comment by davidjhall | Hacker News Reader

Why MariaDB+Galera vs. MySQL Cluster? I read the political decision of Maria being more robust and non-Oracle, but was MySQL Cluster considered? And if not, why?

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Dunno about the author here, but when I looked at MySQL Cluster a while back, it immediately disqualified itself for lacking foreign key support. That's apparently been newly added in the last few months, but there's still no shortage of annoying limitations to be had.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-cluster-limitat...

And apparently they require a minimum of six nodes. And the supported installation method is a GUI installer. Sounds like typical "enterprise" Oracle trash, further eroding whatever confidence I might have in it.

That's NDB cluster, not Galera. They are apples and oranges.

Please re-read the comment I replied to, which was asking why MySQL Cluster (NDB) would not be considered as an alternative to Galera. Using Galera in production myself, I'm well aware they are different things.

At that rate, I'm curious why Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) wasn't in the lineup of considerations.

PXC and MariaDB+Galera are mostly the same code.

I think the only difference is MariaDB has done more work on the query optimizer.

Maria uses Percona's InnoDB patchset (XtraDB).

Both use the galera patch from codership.

I don't think Percona merges anything back from Maria.

I'm under the vague impression Percona's codebase has some additional patches involving backup and management that haven't been pulled into MariaDB, but I might be mistaken. Obviously there's also simple release cycle lag.

The percona tools are mostly outside the direct mysql environment and more on the innodb or linux end of things. I'm not personally aware of any that rely on codebase changes.

(I helped write the piece)

I went with MariaDB because of the features in MariaDB - because the goal wasn't just to improve availability, but to speed up queries, and the improvements MariaDB's made to complex queries and indexing made that decision easy when compared to Percona Server or MySQL Cluster.

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