I have already moved some of my servers to mariadb, with minor to none downtime during the process, but I have also kept some of them stuck with mysql just because of the "official" support (well, it is the elected one in main repository after all)
I have also done some bench marking and have also seen no loss in performance, depending on the memcache/loadbalance/db engine, it got even a little better.
They have published some bug fixes that were really critical for me.
And MOST OF THE TIME, the binaries and libraries are transparently compatible with MySQL, therefore, I have never had an application or frame work even realize it was not running on top of MySQL.
I have seen a few discussions in the past couple of years (not sure from who) in the ubuntu-server list, and back when I have first followed this up, maintainers claimed it was not really fully compatible due to some of the dependencies that the other packages have set, and apache2 was one of the most important... So have in mind there will have a major scrub in a lot of packages to change their dependencies from mysql (and its libraries) to mariadb.
Of course, its a doable task, but might be a little larger than we may first realize.
2012/2/7 Marc Deslauriers
<marc.deslauriers@canonical.com>
On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 01:50 -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> I'm writing to the greater Debian and Ubuntu community to ask for your
> thoughts on a proposal to drop MySQL in favor of MariaDB. Its clear to
> me that Oracle is not going to do work in the open, and this will become
> a huge support burden for Linux distributions. The recent CVE's had to
> be hunted down and investigated at great difficulty to several people,
> since the KB articles referenced and the internal Oracle bug numbers
> referenced were not available.
>
> This will only get harder as the community bug tracker gets further out
> of sync with the private one.
As a member of the security team, I think Oracle's move to a private bug
tracker and not publishing details on the security issues is a disaster
for Linux distributions attempting to maintain MySQL.
I would support moving to a project that still does development in the
open and is not actively trying to hide details of security issues.
Marc.
--
Fábio Leitão
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