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

[Henrik Ingo]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Walter Heck <walterheck at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for MariaDB, I like their much more community driven development
> that seems less commercially driven,
...
> At this point I think MariaDB would probably be a better match for
> being in the main ubuntu/debian distro's as their whole ecosystem
> seems to match better.

Nuances, but I always like to separate the following:

I wouldn't say that MariaDB is any more a community fork than Percona
is. MariaDB is 100% controlled by Monty and his company, just like
Percona Server is controlled and developed by Percona. Both companies
are community friendly and open source minded. However, MariaDB has a
strategy of being very inclusive while Percona has a strategy of not
deviating too much from "upstream" MySQL. This is great, because
including things like more storage engines in MariaDB exposes them to
more users - so MariaDB does a great service to those engines in the
MySQL ecosystem.

I believe it is important to make this distinction though, because
many people in Linux distribution space have a tendency to cheer for
the community projects. That would be "neither of the above". (see
Drizzle :-)

Otoh even MariaDB is not - unfortunately - even close at capturing the
wholeness of what is out there in the MySQL ecosystem. I've already
mentioned major things like MySQL 5.5 or Galera, otoh there are lots
of smaller patches too like those from Anders Karlsson or TaoBao. So
like I said, it is unfortunate we don't have a distribution that would
really cover the whole community.

Hence it is a bit of a paradox really: In theory MariaDB should
satisfy more users, since it tries to include more features. In
practice however I've repeatedly found that Percona has been (much)
faster to include stuff that really matters, like MySQL 5.5,
HandlerSocket and Galera. (HandlerSocket is also in the MariaDB 5.3
Release Candidate now.)

So yes, it is difficult to say that either is better than the other.
"In theory, things always work according to the theory, but in
practice they don't."

> Let it be clear that I have no commercial benefits from either one
> over the other, just voicing my opinion.

Good idea to do disclosures! Always a big fan of those:

I believe as an ex employee I own some shares on the MariaDB side.
(The paperwork is still unclear.) So I could greatly benefit if all
the Linux distributions would default to MariaDB and it would then
achieve world domination. I have no financial ties to Percona. When I
worked for MySQL and Sun I had some options that I lost when
resigning.

I currently work for an organization that is a heavy MySQL end user
and have tried to provide this perspective in my writings in this
thread.

henrik
-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
+358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

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