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1) Mariadb Development Is More Open and Vibrant
1) Mariadb Development Is More Open and Vibrant
Unlike many other open source projects Oracle inherited from the Sun acquisition, Oracle does
indeed still develop MySQL and to our knowledge they have even hired new competent
developers after most of the original developers resigned. The next major release MySQL 5.7
will have significant improvement over MySQL 5.6. However, the commit log of 5.7 shows that
all contributors are @oracle.com. Most commit messages reference issue numbers that are only
in an internal tracker at Oracle and thus not open for public discussion. There are no new
commits in the latest 3 months because Oracle seems to update the public code repository only in
big batches post-release. This does not strike as a development effort that would benefit from the
public feedback loop and the Linus law of given enough eyes all bugs are shallow.
MariaDB on the other hand is developed fully in the open: all development decisions can be
reviewed and debated on a public mailing list of in the public bug tracker. Contributing to
MariaDB with patches is easy and patch flow is transparent in the fully public and up-to-date
code repository. The Github statistics for MySQL 5.7 show 24 contributors while the equivalent
figure for MariaDB 10.1 is 44 contributors. But it is not just a question of code contributors in
our experience MariaDB seems more active also in documentation efforts, distribution packaging
and other related things that are needed in day-to-day database administration.
Because of the big momentum MySQL has had, there is still a lot of community around it but
there is a clear trend that most new activities in the open source world revolve around MariaDB.
As Linux distributions play a major role in software delivery, testing and quality assurance, the
fact that the both RHEL 7 and SLES 12 ship with MariaDB instead of MySQL increases the
likelihood that MariaDB is going to be better maintained both upstream and downstream in years
to come.
MariaDB however follows good industry standards by releasing security announcements and
upgrades at the same time and handling the pre-secrecy and post-transparency in a proper way.
MariaDB release notes also list the CVE identifiers pedantically and they even seem to update
the release notes afterwards if new CVE identifiers are created about issues that MariaDB has
already released fixes for.
3) More cutting edge features
MySQL 5.7 is looking promising and it has some cool new features like GIS support. However,
MariaDB has had much more new features in recent years and they are released earlier, and in
most cases those features seem to go through a more extensive review before release. Therefore
we at Seravo trust MariaDB to deliver us the best features and least bugs.
For example GIS features were introduced already in the 5.3 series of MariaDB, which makes
storing coordinates and querying location data easy. Dynamic column support (MariaDB only) is
interesting because it allows for NoSQL type functionality, and thus one single database
interface can provide both SQL and not only SQL for diverse software project needs.
5) Better performance
MariaDB claims it has a much improved query optimizer and many other performance related
improvements. Certain benchmarks show that MariaDB is radically faster than MySQL.
Benchmarks dont however always directly translate to real life situations. For example when we
at Seravo migrated from MySQL to MariaDB, we saw moderate 3-5 % performance
improvements in our real-life scenarios. Still, when it all adds up, 5% is relevant in particular for
web server backends, where every millisecond counts. Faster is always better, even if it is just a
bit faster.
Galera support will be even better in MariaDB 10.1, as it will be included in the main version
(and not anymore in a separate cluster version) and enabling Galera clustering is just a matter of
activating the correct configuration parameters in any MariaDB server installation.
Some may argue that in recent years, Oracle has already weakened MySQL in subtle ways.
Maybe, but in Oracles defense, it should be noted that MySQL activities have been much more
successful than for example OpenOffice or Hudson, which both very quickly forked into
LibreOffice and Jenkins with such a momentum, that the original projects dried up in less than a
year.
However, given the choice between Oracle and a true open source project, the decision should
not be hard for anybody who understands the value of software freedom and the evolutive
benefits that stem from global collaborative development.
The last big distribution to get MariaDB was Debian (and based on it, Ubuntu). The intent to
package bug in Debian was already filed in 2010 but it wasnt until December 2013 that the bug
finally got closed. This was thanks to Seravo staff who took care of packaging MariaDB 5.5 for
Debian, from where it also got into Ubuntu 14.04. Later we have also packaged MariaDB 10.0,
which will be included in the next Debian and Ubuntu releases in the first half of 2015.
Despite the migration being easy, we still recommend that database admins undertake their own
testing and always back up their databases, just to be safe.
One of our customers once expressed their interest in migrating from MySQL to MariaDB and
wanted us to confirm whether MariaDB is bug-free. Tragically we had to disappoint them with a
negative answer. However we did assure them that the most important things are done correctly
in MariaDB making it certainly worth migrating to.