Red Hat Ditches MySQL, Switches To MariaDB

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released. MySQL's first employee in Australia, Arjen Lentz, said Fedora and OpenSuSE were community driven, whereas RHEL's switch to MariaDB was a corporate decision with far-reaching implications. 'I presume there is not much love lost between Red Hat and Oracle (particularly since the "Oracle Linux" stuff started) but I'm pretty sure this move won't make Oracle any happier,' said Lentz, who now runs his own consultancy, Open Query, from Queensland. 'Thus it's a serious move in political terms.' He said that in practical terms, MariaDB should now get much more of a public footprint with people (people knowing about MariaDB and it being a/the replacement for MySQL), and direct acceptance both by individual users and corporates."

Re:MySQL is Dead! Just like Cobol

[greg1104]

MySQL filled a niche for web application development, but not very much else. The large banks are all using old-school commercial databases: Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server. Government applications prefer PostgreSQL because of its permissive license. If they want to customize the source code for a project that isn't pubic, they can do that without having to worry about GPL compliance.

Re:3, 2, 1

[frodo from middle ea]

You do realize that they were the ones who sold MySQL to Oracle in the first place, right ?

Re:3, 2, 1

[ShanghaiBill]

Here's the real solution: Don't sell it to a corporation in the first place like Monty did.

MySQL had already been owned by a corporation for more than a decade before Sun bought it. That corporation was "MySQL AB", incorporated in Sweden.

Love MariaDB with only one complaint

[EmperorOfCanada]

I made the switch and couldn't be happier. I haven't done an official speed comparison but it seems that MariaDB is much more responsive. That tiny little ms counter in Sequel Pro is showing much shorter times for routine tasks.

But the fulltext indexing is not available to the default table engine. That is my one complaint.

I would be curious to know what the insider thinking is at Oracle. I suspect they thought they had the free database crowd by the balls. No doubt they had all kinds of interesting long term strategies to switch companies over from MySQL to overpriced Oracle products. Now those strategies are going to fade into nothingness.

Re:oracle doesnt care much....why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought IBM owned DB2?

Re:3, 2, 1

[AdamWill]

We haven't had any problem at all replacing MySQL with MariaDB in Fedora per se.

MySQL folks wanted to keep MySQL in Fedora *too*, and we had some fun figuring out the packaging and upgrade paths such that both new-world-MySQL and MariaDB could be in Fedora with MariaDB replacing old-world-MySQL on F18->F19 upgrades, but RHEL will very easily avoid all that by simply not including new-world-MySQL (I expect).