MariaDB Blog

It's curious to see news about many database products that have come out only recently, since in my personal experience I've seen some companies and their products just evaporate (for example, Clusterpoint a number of years back).

Of course, if there's a sufficient amount of hype/mindshare from the industry towards a certain technology, it feels like the critical mass of attention might perhaps be there to sustain the projects and ensure adoption that's widespread enough for the companies behind them to profit and stay around.

It's also nice to see mentions of MySQL, albeit sadly there's nothing of MariaDB, which has become the "replacement" for MySQL in some projects out there due to the pretty good compatibility: https://mariadb.org/

They even seem to have their own cloud offering, though I cannot comment on it personally (it feels enterprisey and generally I run my own DBs, or let someone manage them in other projects): https://mariadb.com/products/skysql/

Though it's also nice to see PostgreSQL remain popular and it's generally one of the better options for most of the projects out there in my eyes. It has decent tooling, good driver support and lots of useful functionality and plugins (things like PostGIS, for example). I think the article puts it nicely, even if someone could nitpick about the wording:

> PS is batteries included. When a company chooses PG, it gets a database with OLTP, OLAP, Document (JSON-B), FTS (tsvector/tsquery), Time-series (TimescaleDB),…

I do this quite a bit and have many small sites that I manage and create. My go-to VMS hosting service is Digital Ocean (DO) [0] as they offer reasonable rates ($5 - $10/mo) for reasonable machines and have a very nice interface. There's also LowEndBox.com [1] to scour for cheap VMs but I've had mixed results for many of the services listed.

I don't do anything fancy and usually have a VM that runs Ubuntu and Apache or Nginx with mostly static content and some custom Python CGI, where appropriate. I'm not above hand-writing HTML but I also some type of static site generator when Markdown, or something similar, is easier to write it. I haven't found any static site generators that I particularly like, though I've used mkdocs [2].

Personally, I favor minimal front end styling so I tend to gravitate to things like Skeleton.css [3] or Bootstrap [4]. I tend to use Javascript heavy web applications and I personally hate the new breed of front end development frameworks so I prefer the very boring option of jQuery [5] or plain Javascript. I appreciate D3 [6] but I don't really use it. I've found better utility through Pixi.js [7], Two.js [8], Three.js [9]. MathJax [10] is also nice if you're writing math formula. Whenever I get worried about a new front end framework taking over completely, I just have to wait a few years before it drops off and gets replaced with another one. Many of my sites have been running for many years without issue because I use minimal…

Back in the day (MySQL 5.0-5.5 era, when I was working at MySQL/Sun/Oracle in the MySQL support team) the MySQL documentation team was truly amazing and sets the standard for me even today compared to many other docs teams I see.

They had a very long and comprehensive manual. The manual on each page inter-linked easily to switch between the relevant page for different major versions with a dropdown version selector (3.x, 4.x, 5.0, 5.1, 5.5..etc).. and if a page had moved or didn't exist it always accurately redirect to the correct page as you did that switch.

And almost every single engineering change that ever mattered to me made it into the changelog and also had relevant docs. I could largely rely on it and didn't need "git log" like I mostly need today to figure out what changed in a version.

Partly this was process, every closed bug/change went to the docs team to process.. but the team was also fantastic and converting that into relevant docs and writing great docs.

A shame if that has been lost, they did have a stack of layoffs recently in MySQL.. apparently the developer team is also heavily down from where it was. I am sure this writing is a little biased but interesting reading never the less:
https://mariadb.org/reading-the-room-what-europes-mysql-community-is-really-saying/

Official announcement: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariadb/

MariaDB looks likely to inherit a big slice, possibly even a majority, of MySQL's user base over time.

It's not just because MariaDB is as good as any of the "official" editions of MySQL offered by Oracle, but because it has only a single code base under a single Free license (as opposed to differently licensed "open source" and "enterprise" editions), because it has an active not-for-profit foundation looking out for the project and the community[1], and because many of the original contributors to MySQL, including founder Monty Widenius, are now working full-time on MariaDB.[2]

Say hello to the new MySQL -- MariaDB -- same as the old MySQL!

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[1] https://mariadb.org/en/foundation/

[2] http://www.skysql.com/news-and-events/press-releases/skysql-merges-with-mariadb-developers

>No open source company has ever forked code from an existing product, started a competing business, and stolen business away from the originator.

Your main point stands, but one counter-example perhaps worth mentioning is MariaDB (the Enterprise version[1], not just the free version[2]). Oracle's treatment of MySQL was enough to force a reaction from the community to fork and continue to build a drop-in replacement. Although, for the same analogy to apply here a majority of the core Docker developers would need to defect to DockerFork.

[1] https://mariadb.com/

[2] https://mariadb.org/

The only real feature MariaDB offers over vanilla MySQL and Percona is an improved optimizer for complex sql queries [1].

In most cases Percona seems to be a win over both MySQL and MariaDB as it is just patch layer over MySQL with features and tweaks that real production users see and need. These features tend to end up in future MySQL releases like saving and restoring the buffer pool allowing mysql to warm start. I believe that feature made it in to MySQL 5.6 but was added to percona/mysql 5.1.

[1] http://blog.mariadb.org/mariadb-5-3-optimizer-benchmark/