[debian-mysql] [Maria-discuss] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Henrik Ingo]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Fabio T. Leitao
<fabio.tleitao at gmail.com> 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).

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.

Percona Server is like MariaDB in that both of them are compatible
with MySQL and you could do a plug-and-play replacement. Percona
Server is much closer to MySQL (which many think is great), shall I
say more focused. MariaDB has more deviation in the code base and also
adds more stuff like additional storage engines (which many think is
great, especially when you want to play with new features).

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.

The difference is not big, but it is commonly accepted that (InnoDB)
performance wise a vanilla MySQL 5.5 is better than Percona Server 5.1
or MariaDB 5.3. Otoh Percona Server 5.5 improves on MySQL 5.5.

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.

Just wanted to complete the discussion with these perspectives from a
MySQL heavy user.

henrik
-- 
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