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Databases Wikipedia Open Source Oracle IT

Wikipedia Moved To MariaDB 5.5 133

Peetke writes "As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community. Long standing OSS supporter Wikipedia has now moved from an optimized fork of MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5, for both its English and German sites. Wikipedia expects all other languages to follow within a month. Performance-wise, this move has no big implications, but it will ensure our biggest community database will live long and prosper."
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Wikipedia Moved To MariaDB 5.5

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  • Information (Score:5, Funny)

    by neokushan ( 932374 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @08:41AM (#43524199)

    For more information, Wikipedia has a statement regarding MariaDB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kthreadd ( 1558445 )

      What statement? It looks like an ordinary article to me.

      • Re:Information (Score:4, Interesting)

        by theVarangian ( 1948970 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @09:04AM (#43524381)

        What statement? It looks like an ordinary article to me.

        As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over [the] direction [taken] by an acquiring commercial company Oracle.

        It may only be an article but it says all that needs to be said. Oracle bought up MySQL and immediately dropped support for a range of systems that had previously been supported, probably in the hope it would drive scores of customers into the open arms of the Oracle sales team and their extortionate license prices. I now have to migrate several MySQL databases that previously lived a happy life on AIX 5 to something else and MariaDB is a welcome alternative because I'm sure as [Expletive deleted] not going to shell out thousands of $ for overpriced Oracle DBs with a pile of features that I don't need.

      • Re:Information (Score:4, Informative)

        by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @09:25AM (#43524619) Journal
        Correct.At the last line on the page, there is a link to the statement: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariadb/ [wikimedia.org]
      • I think he was aiming for +5 Funny.

        Stupid mods...

    • -1, KarmaWhore

  • slash next? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by axehind ( 518047 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @08:51AM (#43524267)
    Is slashdot next?!?!?!
  • So reading the links etc, there is no real reason that stands out apart from "Oracle may screw MySQL".

    Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

    • by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      What Oracle has done in the past and how they operate their business in general I think.

      Not moving now, is ensuring Oracle will screw you. Why wait for it to happen?

    • by Annirak ( 181684 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @08:57AM (#43524309)

      RTFA.

      For the last several years, we’ve been operating the Facebook fork of MySQL 5.1 with most of our production environment running a build of r3753. We’ve been pleased with its performance; Facebook’s MySQL team contains some of the finest database engineers in the industry and they’ve done much to advance the open source MySQL ecosystem.
      That said, MariaDB’s optimizer enhancements, the feature set of Percona’s XtraDB (many overlap with the Facebook patch, but I particularly like add-ons such as the ability to save the buffer pool LRU list, avoiding costly warmups on new servers), and of Oracle’s MySQL 5.5 provide compelling reasons to consider upgrading. Equally important, as supporters of the free culture movement, the Wikimedia Foundation strongly prefers free software projects; that includes a preference for projects without bifurcated code bases between differently licensed free and enterprise editions. We welcome and support the MariaDB Foundation as a not-for-profit steward of the free and open MySQL related database community.

      It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.

      • The philosophy is sound. Open Source has a future beyond the fall of any individual enterprise
      • by CRC'99 ( 96526 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @09:22AM (#43524587) Homepage

        It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.

        Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.

        Philosophy - maybe - however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS - more than a lot of companies - See: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/technical-contributions-1689636.html [oracle.com]

        In a nutshell, they are working on NFS over IPv6, data integrity checks for ext3, they maintain libstdc++, they worked hard on BTRFS, If anything, they have helped open source much more than most other companies.

        Again, I don't see the philosophical reasons other than 'because we can'.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS

          Looking like you support OSS is not a bad business move as even Microsoft has learned. It also makes underhanded sabotage of OSS much easier because they can "We support OSS and aren't greedy scum" FUD most people.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Oracle has a few employees that are solid OSS contributors, and apparently they have some management support. That's been true for years (e.g. their OCFS filesystem...). However, they're only an OSS contributor in a tactical sense. Many years ago (and much earlier than one would've expected!) they came to the realization that Linux was the future (or at least, a large chunk of the future) in the server space, and they made the very smart tactical decision that they didn't want to be relegated to a dusty

          • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            Does the reason matter so long as they do it? And I doubt anyone ever believed that Oracle did it out of the kindness of their heart. They're a commercial organisation, they have to make a profit - or at least break even. And they won't do that buy not selling anything. In fact more people buying Oracle keeps them in business and that'll keep them employing OSS coders.

            There's no such thing as a free lunch - OSS coders either have to be paid for their work or they do it in the free time when they can around

            • by geek ( 5680 )

              Does the reason matter so long as they do it?

              Yes because it means their support is shakey and their motivations can swing them in another direction at any time. Oracle can sabotage any project they are a part of and knowing who their CEO is should make people wary of them.

              I'm not a purist but I get where the purists come from when it comes to Oracle. I don't trust them and I don't give them my money.

            • by Annirak ( 181684 )

              Does the reason matter so long as they do it?

              Again, I said it was a philosophical motivation. Philosophy is the place where the reasons for things matter.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.

          ??

          For our most common query type, 95th percentile times over an 8-hour period dropped from 56ms to 43ms and the average from 15.4ms to 12.7ms.

          Emphasis mine. This is a 18% drop in average query time. This is easily like getting an extra server for every 9 servers you already have. I don't know how many servers they have, but the transition represents thous

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @09:00AM (#43524343) Journal

      "Oracle may screw MySQL".

      Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

      One definition of madness is to try the same thing again and again and keep expecting different results. It's Oracle. You will get screwed.

      • "Oracle may screw MySQL".

        Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

        One definition of madness is to try the same thing again and again and keep expecting different results. It's Oracle. You will get screwed.

        Amen!

      • by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:39PM (#43527103) Homepage

        I don't understand why people trust MariaDB either. The result the last time everyone jumped onto Monty's open-source ship? He cashed out and put all of his customers on a road that led to being screwed by Oracle. There's a bit of madness expecting different results adopting MariaDB I wouldn't buy into either.

        Hint: when a contributor agreement like the MariaDB one says copyright must be assigned to "Monty Program AB", your contributors are usually being setup so that the owner of that copyright can then profit from the community's free work on the project, a decision that will be motivated by what's best for them. There are a few software projects that require copyright assignment that aren't doing that, like the gnu projects. Monty Program AB is not a non-profit with a decades long history of anti-commercialism like gnu though. It's a regular company run by someone who has screwed both his paying customers and his open-source user community exactly this way once. Why are people signing up such that he could do it again?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      MariaDB has quite a few improvements over MySQL. More information here: https://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-features/

      Note that this does not address the specific storage backend features, which are quite attractive on their own. There are even plans to revive a key-value store backend at some point.

      Said improvements may or may not be a factor in their decision to move, but it's almost a completely drop-in replacement. So the real question would by why not. Simply having it running on my servers

    • Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

      The performance increases were negligible (with some decreases, as well) so: No reason to switch other than a symbolic statement and to avoid any potential future licencing issues or litigation. The MariaDB project will mirror the free-as-in-beer (and maybe paid?) features of future MySQL versions while aiming to be a "drop-in" replacement. On the other hand, it's better to do it now in case the projects do diverge and the MySQL upgrade path becomes problematic or expensive.

    • If you arfe a business looking forward to the long term those ifs, buts and maybes are important.
      You serve yourself well by not waiting till the last minute.

  • As we all know?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Crimplene Prakman ( 82370 ) <prak AT iol DOT ie> on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @08:58AM (#43524325) Journal
    "As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community." This is a bit weasely. We all don't know any such thing. For example, Oracle was in the top ten of organisations that contributed code to Linux last year: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2012/04/linux-foundation-releases-annual-linux-development-report [linuxfoundation.org] Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux, and made several large contributions from that front. Shucks, it's even got its own OSS portal: https://oss.oracle.com/ [oracle.com] I'm happy to agree it's a big bad corporate beast and does a lot of wrong in the world, but if you're going to criticize it, at least be factual.
    • by SIGBUS ( 8236 )

      True, but then again, Oracle has closed off access to MySQL test cases, and let's not forget what they did to OpenSolaris.

      • As far as I know they just stopped contributing to OpenSolaris. But they never attempted to stop anyone from picking it up and keep running with it, which led to Illumos and a few other projects taking its place. It's unfortuneate, but not evil.

        MySQL is a bit of a different story.

    • "Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux"

      Ah you're maybe referring to the CentOS-like clone they created from Red Hat's source packages. Once they spun their isos and slapped together a 3 page website they went after Red Hat's customers saying "their" so called unbreakable Linux is better than Red Hat's. That same unbreakable Linux which is based *entirely* on Red Hat's source packages. That's pretty evil in my book. Add how they are shielding off MySQL bugs and development and what they did to

  • Me too, in all my production server!

  • But is MariaDB web scale [youtube.com]?

  • If they can only move to Web 2.0, they might bring the website into the "early" 21st century.

    • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      they might bring the website into the "early" 21st century

      I don't understand what it means when people say that. It's a website with organized, searchable content that can deliver varying forms of multimedia. What is not "21st century" about it?

  • What can others (non self hosters) do? Will Amazon offer MariaDB? Is there a reason they will never do such?

    Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets. [slashdot.org]
  • by DragonWriter ( 970822 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @10:54AM (#43525673)

    Wikipedia was using a non-Oracle fork of MySQL (a Facebook maintained fork of MySQL 5.1) and moved to a different non-Oracle fork (MariaDB). The comment about Oracle not being a friend of OSS seems to be a non-sequitur.

  • "MariaDB"? "Ishmael view" Jeebus, what's going on here? And now http://mariadb.org/ [mariadb.org] has been slashdotted^H^H^H DDoS'ed to death by the criminal organisation known as Slashdot!

    Maybe we'll see some coverage in the TechEye Bible [techeye.net], wonderful proze!

  • Larry kills another one. Are there any "open" OSS projects left at Oracle?

  • Should have switched to PostgreSQL instead. But that would require cleaning up shitty SQL statements that only work with MySQL/MariaDB.

Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time. -- D. Gries

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