Hi Colin

On 09/12/2010, at 5:24 PM, Colin Charles wrote:

In February 2010, we released MariaDB 5.1. In November 2010, we released MariaDB 5.2. In a span of those months, we've seen a 4x increase in downloads of MariaDB. I've heard many stories of people running it on their blog, and there are people running it on single server instances. I myself run it on about six servers of mine in production... And Daniel will attest to running all the Monty Program infrastructure on MariaDB :)

I'm curious to know where MariaDB is going. Where its getting installed. Are only software developers playing with it, or is it getting into production environments?

Please don't hesitate to discuss it here on the maria-discuss mailing list so we can all get a better idea of where MariaDB is being used. If its being used in "secretive" environments, don't hesitate to drop me a private email

As publically stated and known, Open Query uses MariaDB as its server of choice for deployments of 5.1 and above. Clients are definitely allowed to use a stock MySQL 5.1, or another flavour, but generally they choose to go MariaDB for a variety of reasons including being more up to date (compared to stock distro versions), availability of DEB packages (Debian/Ubuntu), the additional instrumentation, and so on - essentially the same reasons OurDelta builds existed for 5.0.

So "hell yea" it's seeing production, and that includes big fish such as online retailers and broadcasters (Australia's SBS Broadcasting world (soccer) cup environment was entirely MariaDB 5.1) as well as a variety of smaller but no less critical deployments. The most common setup is dual masters with MMM and generally 2+ slaves, although there are some "plain dual masters" cases which I've recently written about on the OQ blog (the cache preload story).

We haven't had any issues, that is, other than encountering some bugs that also exist in stock MySQL.

We've been looking in to using PBXT for some specific workloads (such as sustained high volume write environments) and clients are quite serious about that and pretty happy so far as we gain understanding of how PBXT works. Similarly, people are experimenting with the OQGraph engine in 5.2, and we see modules pop up for various languages and environments that specifically utilise it. For both engines, it's quite clearly the case that "ease of deployment" by just having them available with the server greatly helps their uptake - it might even be considered critical to that, possibly a lesson for other engines.

We have deployments that use 5.0 OurDelta which includes the Sphinx storage engine; they'll be skipping straight to MariaDB 5.2 since that's the only next release that also supports this engine. Naturally that's a pretty big step so it involves extra diligence, but it is happening.

Regards, Arjen.