MariaDB instead of MySQL

[Unkle Nuke]

Given Oracle's takeover of Sun, they are now the owners of MySQL.

I've been tracking reports on changes that Oracle has made to MySQL as they begin to make features proprietary, ending the open source era of our favorite database.

Of primary concern to the operation of MaNGOS is that Oracle has ceased notifications and patches for security flaws for the Community edition of MySQL. Speed and efficency optimizations are now applied only to the Enterprise edition. In short, Oracle is putting the screws to those of us who use the open source Community MySQL.

Aside from the obvious vulnerabilities MaNGOS databases face from using MySQL, Oracle's new strategy runs counter to the open source philosophy we here at MaNGOS claim to support.

But there is a solution...

The creators of MySQL left Oracle, in protest to the crippling and gutting of their work. In answer to the corporate pinheads that have betrayed them, these guys started MariaDB. It is a fully open source fork of MYSQL, designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL. This means you can transfer your existing MySQL databases into MariaDB with no trouble and developer projects will not need refactoring. MariaDB also includes improvements, optimizations, and security fixes that MySQL Community Edition does not have and never will have, under Oracle's ownership. Being a completely separate project, MariaDB is free to grow in directions Oracle denied for MySQL. This offers us an ever better database in the future. MariaDB is available for many flavors of Linux, Windows, and other platforms.

Read more about it and download everything you need at http://mariadb.org

I vote that MaNGOS turn its back on MySQL and adopt MariaDB as the new official database!

How about the rest of you?

[Xenithar]

Yeah Oracle quickly killed OpenOffice because they have a love affair with Microsoft. What did the devs do? They created LibreOffice. It looks and works identically to OpenOffice, but is faster, more efficient, more compatible with MS Office documents, and it has more features than OpenOffice. I imagine they are killing MySQL because it was so popular and had such widespread use. Killing it means that their DB9 software and MSSQL will have more market share. I am waiting for the death of Java in favor of something stupid like Silverlight. I have grown to hate Oracle, and I say that as an American IT professional that supports hundreds of systems.

Now, as for moving to MariaDB, I need to research it more. The bigger problem will be support for MariaDB outside of Windows. The best servers are not Windows servers, they are Unix, Linux, BSD and the like. If this new database server is not in their repositories, Linux people are stuck with MySQL. I run hundreds of Linux servers for corporations and they all run MySQL. I had not even heard of MariaDB until tonight, so chances are it may be a few years before it gets into all of the repositories for the various Linux distros. Sure, we could install it by hand but that is a serious pain and I for one would not do it on all of the servers I take care of because it would take weeks or even months to do. It is a lot simpler to do aptitude install mysql-server. I will research this new DB server and post my opinion though.

[antz]

Slightly off-topic

If we choose to switch from MySQL, this will be an interesting test of modular our DB Libraries are.

I look forward to you input Seph

[Guest]

Until mariadb gets into the official linux repos i doubt people will be able to use it. I didnt make my installation work. Ofc it works great on windows, but thats unimportant. Another thing is: Why have a official database manager, when you can have several ones. I've been interested in running XtraDB for awhile now (maria's innodb) but never got it working on windows. I guess the mysql community must choose for themselves. MaNGOS cannot start a new trend by themselves. Give it some time until people start getting their databases hacked, then community will change.

About integrated db's: Why? MySQL serves good enough, very configureable. I doubt SQLite for example is as fast as mysql. And what if you want to run servera splitted over network? How will they work then? Websites must be able to connect to them etc..

Summary: Stick with MySQL until MariaDB grows more mature in it's packaging and support.

[Xenithar]

Antz, it should work with no code changes here. It is nearly 100% compatible with MySQL so any SQL statements you already use will just work. The few incompatibilities are things that will not affect the MaNGOS project. They are minor and may not affect anybody at all. Read over the info on their site and you will see what I mean.

LilleCarl, MariaDB is already taking market share from MySQL due to several blunders on Oracle's part including leaving some major security holes unpatched to this day. MariaDB had them patched on day one. MariaDB also offers a repository that can be used by users of Debian 5, Debian 6, and now Debian 7. All that a Debian user must do is add the repo to /etc/apt/sources.list and do an update. After that a simple install makes it a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Oh, and Fedora 19 is going to use MariaDB as they already announced. Seeing as how Fedora is the free RedHat, one must wonder if it will be an option in a future RedHat release as well.

I have been reading a lot on this since it matters to me personally as a systems admin and an IT professional. I am currently leaning towards MariaDB and, should I choose to go that route, I will first deploy it on our online timeclock system. That should put it through the works and give it a real test. If I go this route, I will post the results here.

[Unkle Nuke]

Since MariaDB is forked from MySQL by the original creators of MySQL, it's absurdly obvious that MariaDB is at least as mature as MySQL. They are far from being a fledgling project started from scratch.

As I stated in my original post, MariaDB already supports many versions of Linux. Binary and source packages are available for several major distros, including Debian, Redhat, CentOS, and Ubuntu. They also support Mac OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris, SPARC and other operating systems. It can also be ported to a variety of other platforms, since the sources are freely available. So anyone can see that MariaDB isn't just for Windows.

There are also Java and C developer plugins provided. Plugins for Python, .NET and C#/Mono should be coming soon.

You can find additional information, knowledge base, and links at the MariaDB Development website, http://askmonty.org , and their corporate sponsor, http://www.skysql.com .

For those of you wondering how serious the security flaws in MySQL can be, this MariaDB blog post - http://blog.mariadb.org/unbreakable-mysql/ - written by the former lead security developer for MySQL, is very alarming. It lists many CVE reports of outstanding bugs in MySQL which are easily exploited by anyone with enough knowledge to simply Google for the right scripts. Oracle has still not patched several of these flaws despite having many months to do so. MariaDB already has patched or will soon implement patches for these holes, plus a few not even acknowledged by Oracle.

If supporting open source isn't persuasive enough to make the switch to MariaDB, you ought to consider that MaNGOS is wide open to attack by legions of "script kiddies" by sticking with MySQL. It makes you wonder how many MaNGOS servers have already been compromised or had a simple stack overflow attack being the real cause for unexplained crashes.

With their war on open source, closed security practices, and the Java disaster also making headlines,any so-called "open source" software which bears Oracle's name is something I wouldn't touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole!

I have already made the switch. Conscience and intellect makes it imperative that MaNGOS does the same.

[lfxgroove]

As others stated this change doesn't need to be done rather than replacing the word mysql with mariadb in the repos, i'm using mariadb instead of mysql and it works nicely.

[Svarr]

As others stated this change doesn't need to be done rather than replacing the word mysql with mariadb in the repos, i'm using mariadb instead of mysql and it works nicely.

Thats good to know.

I will switch to mariadb too, next time I reinstall everything.

[sanctum32]

postgresql also is posible replacement...

[antz]

I been using mariadb for a month or so now and it's working flawlessly. I didn't have to change anything in mangos to make it work, it just did

[bels]

postgresql also is posible replacement...

I second this. PostgreSQL is the main database I use and there is no corporation that governs the postgresql code base so a take over is of little concern in my opinion. I also think postgresql has more options especially with programming language support running in the database than mysql/mariadb AFAIK. Whether or not the project decides to use postgresql I am going to make the database compatible with postgresql so I can ditch mysql/mariadb on my FreeBSD servers that run mangos. Once I get my mangos database editor I'm working on to a usable state adding good postgresql support will be my main goal.

[TheLuda]

I would be interested to here something about people's experience with mangos and postgresql.

Is anyone running his realm with that for a longer time, and can report what's different and why you use it?