[debian-mysql] percona vs. mariadb

[micah anderson]

Hi everyone,

It seems everywhere I turn, people are wanting to replace MySQL in
Debian with MariaDB. I share the reasons and motivation behind doing
that, I have been very unhappy with what has happened and is happening
with MySQL (the recent security upgrades were really unfortunte too).

However, I'm struggling to understand why MariaDB, and not Percona
Server (also a drop-in replacement for MySQL, and they even have debian
packages made). From my evaluation today, Percona Server seems like a
big win and I'd like to hear what the pkg-mysql team thinks about this:

1. sustainability: MariaDB seems to be a one man hero effort by Monty,
hoping to get people to rally around him. Not necessarily bad because he
is trying to fix the MySQL situation, but it seems problematic to do
that when Percona exists and seems to have what appears to be a solid
base of people working on it, people who really know their stuff.

2. security: last time there were a series of MySQL security issues, I
looked at MariaDB and it hadn't been updated to fix those after a long
time, due to its slow release cycle, that was disappointing and scary
and might be related to #1

3. stability: MariaDB is MySQL with a couple yeeehaw storage engines
added on top of it... that scares me a little because it adds weird
untested code paths, it also removes storage engines

4. performance: percona looks like a highly tuned mysql plus awesome
sauce and all the big orgs that are wanting to scale move to it, so it
is either 'webscale' hand waving or actually good. Every time I look
around for performance tuning stuff in MySQL, I'm always seeing the
largest amount of good signal coming out of the Percona arena. If you
look at the Percona comparison chart[0] you will see a number of
different things that it has that look really interesting, as does the
benchmarks[1] (which of course are going to favor them, so grain of salt
and all that). I particularly like the SSD optimizations they've
done[2].

5. multi-master clustering: mariadb is working towards getting galera
integrated, but it is still beta, where percona has had it integrated
for a while and people use it. This means adding the xtradb storage
engine, which I am arguing against above in #3, but from what I can tell
xtradb is just InnoDB with some nice row-level replication features
added and Percona decided to add that after evaluating it, leaving the
other storage engine toys for other people to mess around with

6. tested: just have a look at who in the industry has already switched
to percona[2], an impressive list!

interested in hearing what people are thinking,
micah

0. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server/feature-comparison
1. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server/benchmarks
2. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server/for-ssd
3. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server/users
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