On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Walter Heck walterheck@gmail.com wrote:
As for MariaDB, I like their much more community driven development that seems less commercially driven,
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At this point I think MariaDB would probably be a better match for being in the main ubuntu/debian distro's as their whole ecosystem seems to match better.
Nuances, but I always like to separate the following:
I wouldn't say that MariaDB is any more a community fork than Percona is. MariaDB is 100% controlled by Monty and his company, just like Percona Server is controlled and developed by Percona. Both companies are community friendly and open source minded. However, MariaDB has a strategy of being very inclusive while Percona has a strategy of not deviating too much from "upstream" MySQL. This is great, because including things like more storage engines in MariaDB exposes them to more users - so MariaDB does a great service to those engines in the MySQL ecosystem.
I believe it is important to make this distinction though, because many people in Linux distribution space have a tendency to cheer for the community projects. That would be "neither of the above". (see Drizzle :-)
Otoh even MariaDB is not - unfortunately - even close at capturing the wholeness of what is out there in the MySQL ecosystem. I've already mentioned major things like MySQL 5.5 or Galera, otoh there are lots of smaller patches too like those from Anders Karlsson or TaoBao. So like I said, it is unfortunate we don't have a distribution that would really cover the whole community.
Hence it is a bit of a paradox really: In theory MariaDB should satisfy more users, since it tries to include more features. In practice however I've repeatedly found that Percona has been (much) faster to include stuff that really matters, like MySQL 5.5, HandlerSocket and Galera. (HandlerSocket is also in the MariaDB 5.3 Release Candidate now.)
So yes, it is difficult to say that either is better than the other. "In theory, things always work according to the theory, but in practice they don't."
Let it be clear that I have no commercial benefits from either one over the other, just voicing my opinion.
Good idea to do disclosures! Always a big fan of those:
I believe as an ex employee I own some shares on the MariaDB side. (The paperwork is still unclear.) So I could greatly benefit if all the Linux distributions would default to MariaDB and it would then achieve world domination. I have no financial ties to Percona. When I worked for MySQL and Sun I had some options that I lost when resigning.
I currently work for an organization that is a heavy MySQL end user and have tried to provide this perspective in my writings in this thread.
henrik