MySQL is a dead product walking. I know it, people around me are starting to realize it and Monty sure as hell knows it. For those not familiar with MySQL’s roots, Monty Widenius is one of the founder of MySQL.
Recently, Monty has staged an all-out attack on the Sun-Oracle merger, due to the promises that Oracle made towards the MySQL product that apparently it has no intention to keep.
Luckily, we (MySQL users) have a great alternative: MariaDB. MariaDB is a fully compatible MySQL fork, once again backed by Monty. And it has all the features MySQL has and then some. Better multicore support, better performance, more storage engines, … If you’re planning on using MySQL for any project, consider using MariaDB instead. For the Ubuntu users out there, there are APT repositories available for MariaDB, and they are updated frequently.
Now if only Monty was able to rebuild the client libraries for MySQL to remove that pesky GPL license…
#1 by Chris Kaminski on 2010/10/25 - 23:00
Perhaps all this fragmentation will lead to more hosting providers supporting PostgreSQL. A man can dream, can’t he?
#2 by Will Sargent on 2010/11/02 - 18:11
Yeah, frankly I’d rather use PostgreSQL any day of the week. MySQL just has too many things wrong with it.
#3 by Lieven Doclo on 2010/11/03 - 07:46
That’s why I prefer MariaDB over MySQL. PostgreSQL is a close second, but the learning curve is somewhat steeper for PostgreSQL, since it’s more Oracle-like than MySQL (and therefor perceived as more enterprisey). So, MariaDB if I can, PostgreSQL if I can’t… that’s the idea