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Databases

MariaDB vs. MySQL: A Performance Comparison 112

Nerval's Lobster writes "MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL source code, split off in the wake of concerns over what Oracle would do with MySQL licensing. In addition to its role as a 'drop-in replacement' for MySQL, MariaDB also includes some new features that (some claim) make it better than MySQL. Jeff Cogswell compares MySQL and MariaDB and suggests (in his opinion) that there's 'more than enough reason to ditch MySQL and switch over to MariaDB and stay there.' Why? While he breaks down MariaDB's new features and thinks many of them aren't that fantastic, and while MariaDB's performance isn't that much better than that of MySQL ('MariaDB's performance appears a bit better on multi-core machines, but I strongly suspect that one could tweak MySQL to match'), the questions over Oracle and MySQL licensing give him pause. 'MariaDB shows every indication that it will be around for quite awhile, while you can't really say the same of Oracle's MySQL,' he writes. 'Free-and-open MySQL competes with Oracle's proprietary and extremely competitive tools. That alone is grounds for concern — will Oracle do something to impede MySQL's development?'"
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MariaDB vs. MySQL: A Performance Comparison

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  • Great summary! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:39PM (#43795673)

    The only link goes to another Slashdot page! Well done!

    • Re:Great summary! (Score:5, Informative)

      by icebike ( 68054 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:09PM (#43795927)

      It links to a Slashdot Channel article, which never appeared in the regular part of Slashdot.

      Slashdot is not one-dimensional any more. It has grown a first-print arm for new articles.
      By your comment, I wager it was your first visit to a Slashdot Channel.

      • Re:Great summary! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anrego ( 830717 ) * on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:14PM (#43795983)

        Interlinking like this still seems in poor taste.

        • So if sub-domain.domain.com writes an original content, domain.com should never mention it even if domain.com is an aggregator of the type of news that sub-domain wrote content for?

          Would it be better if the sub-domain just spun off and you never even knew there was a relationship?

          • by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

            Would it be better if the sub-domain just spun off and you never even knew there was a relationship?

            To be honest, I think I'd be happier with that. If you look at it objectively it's probably not that bad, but slashbi just seems to clash against the culture I associate with slashdot, and I interpret this kind of crosslinking as an attempt to push the established slashdot crowd into what appears at first glance to be a failing attempt to draw in the kind of pseudo-technical suit crowd (I don't know the numbers though, maybe slashbi has been a huge success..).

            Want to make slashbi known, fine, put something

            • I interpret this kind of crosslinking as an attempt to push the established slashdot crowd into what appears at first glance to be a failing attempt to draw in the kind of pseudo-technical suit crowd

              so... wtf are you doing on slashdot again?

              either that or you must be new here... welcome to self interest land (oops did i say self interest land i meant slashdot)

              • by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

                Habit.

                I've been browsing slashdot for over a decade. Around 6 or 7 years under this account alone (I did the AC thing for a while..). Corney as it sounds, I've got some very fond memories of very insightful discussions had here, some of which legitimately impacted my life and at least many that actually changed how I thought about something.

                As shitty as slashdot gets, it'll take a long damn time to erode away that kind of legacy.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @04:06PM (#43797575)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      Actually, I thought it was a pretty good summary. It explained what MariaDB is and why it is being compared to MySQL, without forcing the user to have to search around just to figure out what the summary is talking about.

    • by sootman ( 158191 )

      It's a new technology they're testing called "the instantaneous dupe". It's pretty cool stuff.

  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:42PM (#43795703) Homepage

    Today the list of incompatabilities is small and unimportant. I wonder if one will make a really useful difference that would encourage developers choose one or the other; then users would really need to choose. At the moment which you use doesn't really matter.

    • by jgrahn ( 181062 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:09PM (#43795931)

      Today the list of incompatabilities is small and unimportant. I wonder if one will make a really useful difference that would encourage developers choose one or the other; then users would really need to choose. At the moment which you use doesn't really matter.

      If that's true, now is the best time to switch. Not when/if the vendor starts squeezing your balls.

      • by unrtst ( 777550 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:39PM (#43796205)

        But there is no good reason to switch besides hypothetical future situations. If one is already on either product, just stay there until something happens... so long as they are both still compatible.

        The performance issues noted in the article doesn't make any sense to me. From the article:

        One common result of not coding these correctly is you’ll start out seeing an improvement in the first 8 or 16 threads, and after that you won’t get nearly the hoped-for improvement. When you see that problem, it means there’s likely trouble with the algorithms. (And this will be the case with either hyperthreads or hardware threads.) That’s what we’re seeing here with the MySQL benchmarks. To me, that’s an indication of trouble with MySQL scaling, and should be a cause for concern. MariaDB also has a slight problem in the same benchmark as the performance goes down slightly, but only barely; I would surmise that this isn’t a problem with the parallel algorithms.

        ...but the graph at the top of the article does NOT show that! What benchmark is he referring to? The one at the top of the article shows MySQL 5.5.29 performing almost exactly the same as both versions of MariaDB that were tested. MySQL 5.6.10 performed a little different, which is because... well, we don't know due to lack of information there (he even says it may not have been compiled correctly, and a few other possible reasons).

        If MariaDB does perform noticably better on many core machines (> 32), I'd be interested to know that, and that could be a justifiable reason to consider it.Even so, why go through that effort? And if you're running >32 cores on your DB, chances are it's a large DB and would take a fair bit of time to smoothly cut over... not really worth it IMO.

        • But there is no good reason to switch besides hypothetical future situations. If one is already on either product, just stay there until something happens... so long as they are both still compatible.

          Everything is hypothetical until it happens then everything is obvious in hindsight. GP is right. It is wiser to be with the healthier brand / company / organization. MariaDB is in a much better position than MySQL. Just look at Oracle and it's history. A behemoth like that won't make a 180. What incentive do they have and what have they done to promote and make healthy the MySQL community? No, my friend, they're going to trash MySQL. Now is the time to switch to MariaDB before MariaDB starts implem

    • mysql will die... everyone with an ounce of sense already knows that oracle is scum

      i use mysql... so i'm a moron, but i'll eventually migrate to maria when i can be bothered and become less of a moron :)

    • Sometimes the differences matter. We jumped ship to MariaDB and are mostly happy with it. I am still frustrated with having to periodically rebuild my database because of huge ibdata files (yes we use innodb_file_per_table so it shouldn't be huge but it is after a time). I thought there was a MySQL labs build which enabled something to mitigate this problem which I probably would drop maria in a heartbeat for at the moment if it was in the mainline trunk.

      Anyway, Oracle has apparently added EXPLAIN to sta

  • My my... how times have changed. See back in my day, the vendor walked uphill, both ways, to tell us about the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt of the security using some filthy open source project strung together by a rag tag team of hippies.
    • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:51PM (#43795789) Homepage

      I think concerns about Oracle's long-term plans for MySQL are valid to ask.

      If it isn't making Larry money, what did he buy it for and what is he planning to do with it?

      Oracle isn't exactly a customer friendly company (just ask anyone who had an older Solaris machine when Oracle bought Sun and got told they needed to buy a support contract to even access docs), so I've always wondered why they would buy a free database and continue to develop it and give it away.

      If I was choosing based purely on open-ness, something which doesn't have the chance of Oracle coming along and closing it otherwise strong-arming people would be a plus.

      I guess it legitimately is FUD, but sometimes, there's valid reasons to mistrust such entities. And having dealt with Oracle over the years, they themselves are a very strong reason to be suspicious.

      • Yeah, but Oracle has a lot of money, they do a lot of different things. They can afford to have a product or two that doesn't make them a whole lot of money. MariaDB on the other hand is run by a bunch of the guys who used work on MySQL when it was owned by Sun. They only have one way of making money. That is by selling support contracts. And if Oracle isn't making any money off selling support contracts, I have trouble seeing how MariaDB is going to make any money doing the same. MariaDB seems to me
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yeah but you have oracle purposely trying to cripple MySQL so they can sell more oracle DB licenses.

          The Monty AB guys need MariaDB to be a good product you want to buy support for.

      • by AdmV0rl0n ( 98366 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:10PM (#43795933) Homepage Journal

        I think concerns about Oracle's long-term plans for MySQL are valid to ask.

        If it isn't making Larry money, what did he buy it for and what is he planning to do with it?

        Oracle isn't exactly a customer friendly company (just ask anyone who had an older Solaris machine when Oracle bought Sun and got told they needed to buy a support contract to even access docs), so I've always wondered why they would buy a free database and continue to develop it and give it away.

        If I was choosing based purely on open-ness, something which doesn't have the chance of Oracle coming along and closing it otherwise strong-arming people would be a plus.

        I guess it legitimately is FUD, but sometimes, there's valid reasons to mistrust such entities. And having dealt with Oracle over the years, they themselves are a very strong reason to be suspicious.

        Oracle maintain multiple open source initiatives. *I'm * not making any claim about wether these are maintained 'correctly or not, because the truth is that I am not in a position to state factually what the true state is.

        But - people still use Virtual box. People still use Java. People are still using MySQL.
        I'll pitch - even though I struggle to think its true - that if Oracle maintained them well, and if a true state exaists where the smaller MySQL may lead to an upgrade when things get large to Oracle DB - I can see why a vendor might say to itself that damaging our own product isn't productive. If they trust us implicitly doing a good job on MySQL they will believe the same basic premise on the day they need heavier iron and DB.

        It is understandable commecially to look at things and remove or kill things that are done and have a fork in them. Its another to just vandalise in an unthinking stupid way a well grounded, popular and well regarded product.

        The core question got asked at the end of the first post:
        That alone is grounds for concern — will Oracle do something to impede MySQL's development? Citation and real evidence required.
        The real world, true answer to that question is the real guide, other stuff and argument is fluffy..

      • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:15PM (#43795989)

        what is he planning to do with it?

        It's difficult to describe in words what "do with" means in this context.

        But if you google on "Hentai", you'll find some pictures.

      • If it isn't making Larry money, what did he buy it for and what is he planning to do with it?

        Maybe for the same reason he bought Java, the thing is bringing people to Oracle.com, like million hits per day, do you think it is worth nothing?

      • by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:58PM (#43796397) Homepage

        Concerns about MariaDB's long-term plans are appropriate too. Monty has setup his new company with contributor copyright assignment such that he can sell it off again, the same way he did with MySQL. If you actually taste the FUD here, you should be migrating away from both of these uncertain projects, not deciding which of them to use.

      • by aralin ( 107264 )

        FUD is always legitimate when it propagates the bias of the slashdot community. While Microsoft FUD is always illegitimate because it just is. I like how there is a double standard for everything here.

    • Does it count as FUD if it's really something worth worrying about?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      We're only seeing this because the guy who sold MySQL to Oracle wants a second bite and is trying to discredit what he just sold them as hard as he possibly can so that people move back to his stuff.

      • by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:29PM (#43796109)

        We're only seeing this because the guy who sold MySQL to Oracle wants a second bite and is trying to discredit what he just sold them as hard as he possibly can so that people move back to his stuff.

        I think you may be right.

        The creator of MySQL sold out to Sun and now he's trying to claim that his new DB is better, probably hoping he can sell out again and collect another big paycheck.

        • Except that MySQL copyright is still assigned to MySQL AB (Oracle). So Monty can only make money selling support...

          • by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @02:43PM (#43796831) Homepage

            MariaDB is taking the MySQL code via the GPL and then building on top of it with new code. Those changes are all having their copyright assigned to MariaDB, and in some cases the GPL will also require a public release. Eventually MariaDB is expected to have a non-trivial set of improvements, and the copyright ownership of all the new code will be to MariaDB. That allows selling the combination of GPL core plus some explicitly owned private code, the exact same way MySQL was sold to Sun.

            This is the same scam that let Monty cash out once already, using the work of open source contributors who assigned their copyright to his original company. No reason he can't do it again, if people are gullible enough to fall for it twice.

            • It's more complicated this time. When Monty held copyright to all of MySQL, he was perfectly free to release it under whatever license he liked. Now, he's stuck with a central body of code that he can only access under GPL terms, and therefore any derived work has to be released under the GPL. He's limited in how he can enhance MariaDB without having to release his enhancements under the GPL.

              Even if he can make an argument that some of his stuff isn't covered by the GPL, unless it runs as a separate a

    • by samkass ( 174571 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:21PM (#43796043) Homepage Journal

      My favorite part is that the article is titled "MariaDB vs. MySQL: A Performance Comparison", but since the performance is almost identical they spend most of the summary talking about ideological differences. I guess "MariaDB vs. MySQL: An Ideological Comparison" didn't have the same ring to it.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        It's from the awful Slasdot/BI. What do you expect?

  • by gandhi_2 ( 1108023 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:47PM (#43795759) Homepage

    is percona not cool anymore?

  • Free Oracle (MySQL) may be a competitor to the "not for free" Oracle but I think it still provides value to the company. MySQL has name recognition and reputation, MariaDB is still working on building these. So long as MySQL is around MariaDB will have a harder time doing so and for that reason alone Oracle may well keep MySQL going.
  • by ciantic ( 626550 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:55PM (#43795825)
    They did. In short they stopped providing test cases for new features. Do not use MySQL. Period. Read more about in here. [lwn.net]
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      the heck with that, oracle fucked up mysql the moment they bought sun...

      (while some might argue that mysql was first fucked up by sun when they bought mysql..)

  • Switch (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:00PM (#43795847)

    Switch to Postgres. It'll be there for a long time.

    • MySQL will be there equally as long. The question is whether it will grow as technology does or stagnate.
    • There have been a few ACs around here saying to switch to Postgres and I'm not sure why this one is modded an Insightful 3. I'm a big PostgreSQL fan but I'm not saying that everyone should use PostgreSQL. Simply put: if you want a drop in for a database that will be better than MySQL and without doing much work (and this is the key), then put MariaDB in before MySQL and MariaDB diverge. You'll have a lot more work to do once they diverge. If you want a much better database, then, yes, I suggest PostgreS

      • Yeah, I'm replying to myself, but I thought of something else I'd like to say.

        I've seen good software "upgrade" south for bizarre reasons. I like PostgreSQL and right now it's a healthy community. I believe it is the best database out there, but you know what? I'd like to see MariaDB survive, thrive, and rival PostgreSQL. As a matter of fact, I'd like to have more than two reasonable choices for open source databases. The only way PostgreSQL will continue to be a great database is to have more great da

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:03PM (#43795873)

    Free-and-open MySQL competes with Oracle's proprietary and extremely competitive tools.

    In what sense? Sure MySQL is free, but - and IANADBA - I would think the appropriate usage areas for MySQL and Oracle DBs overlap marginally, if at all. For example, my MythTV system uses MySQL on the back end, but I think using Oracle would be like killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer (no disrespect to sledgehammers). Conversely, Oracle is probably more appropriate for a large distributed / fail-over capable payroll/accounting systems.

    MySQL is simple and small, while Oracle more complex and large - it might actually come with a kitchen sink.

    • by knarfling ( 735361 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:10PM (#43795949) Journal

      ... while Oracle more complex and large - it might actually come with a kitchen sink.

      Orcle does come with a kitchen sink. However, it costs extra if more than one person is in the kitchen at the same time.

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      In what sense?

      Uh, in the sense that many people who, years ago, might have stumped up the cash for Oracle because there was no viable free competition now use MySQL or Postgres because they're good enough to live without that mosquito-killing sledgehammer?

      • In what sense?

        Uh, in the sense that many people who, years ago, might have stumped up the cash for Oracle because there was no viable free competition now use MySQL or Postgres because they're good enough to live without that mosquito-killing sledgehammer?

        True, but that would be a *long* time ago. MySQL ad Postgres have been around since 1995. Even still, I would argue that there are many, many applications for which using Oracle over MySQL/Postgres (or no DB at all) would be overkill.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          enterprise db sells a Postgres version that is a drop in replacement (SQLwise) to oracle
          also remember that postgres mean post ingres

    • Re:Competes? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Walking The Walk ( 1003312 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:44PM (#43796253)

      I would think the appropriate usage areas for MySQL and Oracle DBs overlap marginally

      I am a DBA, and FYI there are multiple editions of Oracle. I'm not sure what use cases you were thinking of, but if you're looking for a free edition there's always Oracle Express Edition [oracle.com]. Free to download, use and distribute, and allows databases up to 11GB. I've worked at companies that run bigger MySQL installations, but I would venture that they are less than 1% of the MySQL user base. The majority of MySQL installations are small ones to back websites, such as Wordpress installations. You could easily replace them with Oracle Express. For other use cases, there's Oracle's NoSQL database, or Oracle's In Memory database (called TimesTen for some obscure reason), and they used to market Oracle Database Lite for mobile apps.

      So in summary, Oracle has a bunch of products that would compete with MySQL, and we can't understand why they don't just give MySQL away to Apache or some other foundation. Maybe they have support contracts that actually bring in some money.

      • Thanks, I wasn't aware of Oracle Express or their NoSQL alternatives. Though, in the case of their free (or is that "free") alternatives, competition for dollars (which is all Larry cares about) probably doesn't really exist. Also, I think when people think about "Oracle" in the general sense of databases, they are thinking of the traditional, large, non-free versions...

        • in the case of their free (or is that "free") alternatives, competition for dollars (which is all Larry cares about) probably doesn't really exist. Also, I think when people think about "Oracle" in the general sense of databases, they are thinking of the traditional, large, non-free versions...

          Agreed on both points. I think the free Oracle offering is designed to encourage adoption and ease upgrade. So you start with the free Express edition, and build up a nice little business, but then performance or space becomes an issue and so the easiest course is to upgrade to Standard Edition for $$. And the developers working for you are all now familiar with Oracle and PL/SQL, so big business and government that run Enterprise edition for $$$$$ have plenty of developers to choose from.

      • Oracle databases are maybe fast, and maybe allow more redundancy but that comes with extra work.

        MySQL and most of the other commercial databases have richer data types allowing for more a more modern feel.

        Sort of like IBM assembler vs. Java. IBM assembler allows screaming fast apps, but at a cost, when that cost approaches the complexity of a modern language, the playing field levels, and suddenly you are better off writing in Java, since you can maintain the code.

        • MySQL and most of the other commercial databases have richer data types allowing for more a more modern feel.

          I'm not sure what datatypes you're referring to. Enum and Set are kind of neat, but other than that both MySQL and Oracle seem to stick to the datatypes defined in the SQL standards.

          Sort of like IBM assembler vs. Java. IBM assembler allows screaming fast apps, but at a cost, when that cost approaches the complexity of a modern language, the playing field levels, and suddenly you are better off writing in Java, since you can maintain the code.

          Funny you should mention Java - were you aware that Oracle databases provide Java integration? It's kind of like MS SQL Server's dotNet integration. So you can do stuff like add your own Java libraries, or store Java objects directly in the database. I've never used it, but I suppose that would qualify as a "rich data type",

          • by Tim12s ( 209786 )

            Had to write a few java classes that executed as part of some trigger and stored proc transactions. I'm actually quite impressed at how well its been working. Uptime is pretty frikken awesome when I look at it somewhere in the order of 2 years.

    • Dear Moderator,

      My previous post quotes TFS directly and asks a direct question w/examples.
      My questions to you are:

      A) How the fuck is that post "off topic"?
      B) Are you retarded?

      Sincerely,
      - Rick

  • Useless FUD (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Migrating to MariaDB "just because" is dumb.

    If Oracle makes it clear that they're not going to support MySQL in a way that's compatible with your business, then consider your alternatives.

    Changing your DB infrastructure will take time & release cycles to properly plan, test, and deploy. If it's a drop-in replacement as they claim, then you will not have much trouble making a quick migration down the line. If it's NOT a drop-in replacement as they claim, you should consider other DB technologies and se

    • Re:Useless FUD (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:19PM (#43796021)

      The longer you wait, the less chance there is of it still being a 'drop-in replacement'. Both sides are likely to make incompatible changes to the database format, and while that's OK when you're running a 1GB database that you can just dump out and restore, it's a problem when you're dealing with 60TB of data.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        And if it's NOT a "drop-in replacement" then you should consider whether Maria DB is the right DB for your needs, if MySQL suddenly no longer is.

        This "ermagherd change to mariadb now now now it's scary to stay on mysql!" panic is fucking stupid - ESPECIALLY if you have 60 TB of data, since there is NO way that your migration will be trivial, small, or easy.

        A "drop in replacement" will still need to be tested fully with a critical piece of your infrastructure, and then you're tied to MariaDB - which may not

  • by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:21PM (#43796037) Homepage

    My son used to play a silly little match game that he picked up from pre-school when he was three years old. In it, he would take two toys -- cars, action figures, Lego blocks, staple removers, whatever -- hold them in his hands, and ask "Which one are you, X or Y?" After the other person (usually me) answered, he'd act out some sort of epic battle between the two toys in his hands, and then declare one or the other the victor. I always pointed out to him the pointlessness of the game. He didn't care.

    Jeff Cogswell's reviews remind me of that game. They're pointless. He doesn't care. And my son grew out of it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I always pointed out to him the pointlessness of the game. He didn't care..

      Instead telling him to stop doing something, you could have told him what he could have done instead. Simply stating something is pointless is pointless.

  • In the latest news around the mysql ecosystem, one thing that was mostly ignored was that TokuDB went open source [tokutek.com], adding an important new storage engine to the table. And comparing TokuDB vs InnoDB performance [mysqlperformanceblog.com] it could matter a lot more (at least, for more kinds of workloads) than switching from MySQL to MariaDB or Percona Server.
  • Anecdotally, we switched to Maria from MySQL during a move to a cloud architecture, and haven't had any major problems with it.

  • by josepsanzcamp ( 1929126 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @02:47PM (#43796877)
    I have done some tests some months ago, and I checked that MariaDB solves some problems that MySQL has. The performance is similar using simple queries, but when you write complex queries with subqueries, lots of joins and more, then MariaDB demonstrates the power of their code. I posted an entry in my wiki of the SaltOS project explaining how MariaDB helped to my project:
    - http://www.saltos.net/portal/en/wiki/75/why-use-mariadb-instead-of-mysql.htm [saltos.net]

    Josep Sanz.
    The SaltOS project.
    • I'm curious what's meant by drop in replacement, is it as simple as installing the other package, and just pointing it to your database folders, files, configs, SQL query, programs, whatever else is required (forgive me i have limited knowledge here) and launch it with your same scripts with simple swap_the_filename type mods...

      or

      Is there lots of scripting, reconfiguring, importing and testing that needs to be done to make it work the "same"?

      What is meant by drop in replacement if someone was going to make

      • Yes it's as simple as that, you can just open your current database files and configuration files with mariadb instead of mysqld and everything should work, even the old libmysqlclient from MySQL will work to access a MariaDB server.
        • Seems like it would be a good thing to be running MariaDB as one of your backups, or test machines just (to show your Oracle support rep:) in case, so if one or the other starts to shine you've seen it working with (replicas of) your data, and know it's compatibility status.

          If it's that easy now, and you had anything close to an important (or large) database someone should be booting both from time to time in testing. It could go either way...

    • by toby ( 759 )

      That post is not very useful or informative. While I would like to believe that MariaDB has done clever things with query planning and execution, it would need a much more rigorous investigation than posed here. For example, he doesn't even explain the form of his queries and the nature of his schema.

      It would also require benchmarking against, say, PostgreSQL, which looks very attractive versus versions of MySQL, for both technical and licensing reasons.

      • Are you refering to my comment about that it's true that MariaDB is more quickly that MySQL??? if true, continue reading, please:

        For my tests, I used the same computer and the same DB files. The procedure was install and uninstall MariaDB and MySQL to have a comparable system. You can check the complexity of the queries and the database schema if you download the source code of my application (search directly the XML files that contain all db schema and queries used by the application). If you want more i
  • make a good switch (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There's been reason to switch from MySQL for 13 years: Postgres.

  • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

    posting to undo bad moderation

  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @05:47PM (#43798399)

    You sold MySQL to uncle Larry for a lot of cash years ago and now we keep hearing about MariaDB vs MySQL.

    After four years of MariaDB and four years of unsubstantiated FUD about Oracles intentions twoard MySQL you choose to make your case using a photo finish performance graph with no error bars.

  • It's classic "double-spending" - sure, I'll sell you my GPL-licensed DB! For millions of dollars? Absolutely! Sold!

    I quit! Now let me fork the thing I just sold to you and keep developing it for free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom.

    Sigh. Silly multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation! I'll be really impressed when Monty Widenius sells MariaDB to Oracle. And then quits.

  • The problem is you need to handle two approaches in your parallel programming: (1) Multithreaded across multiple cores, and (2) vectorization. These are the two facets to today’s multicore programming, and your code needs to handle both aspects correctly.

    WTF would you need vectorization in a DB for?

    I'd stake my dog's life that scalability differenes are not down to compiler switches and SIMD instruction selection. Amdahl's law is more likely to be applicable, and as DBs have many serialization points (disk IO, lock management) it is these that are more likely to affect scalability rather than compiler flags. Xeon Phi? Come on!

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