back to article Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB

Google is migrating its MySQL systems over to MariaDB, allowing the search company to get away from the Oracle-backed open source database. The news came out at the Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) conference in Stanford, California on Wednesday, one month after El Reg reported that Google had assigned one of its engineers to …

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  1. Will Godfrey Silver badge

    And Again

    Does Oracle still have control of anything of value that it got from Sun?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And Again

      Yes, but the real question is: does anyone still use it?

      1. nematoad
        FAIL

        Re: And Again

        "Yes, but the real question is: does anyone still use it?"

        That depends on what you mean by "of value".

        If no-one is using it, what is it worth? Nothing.

        A thing only has the value someone is willing to pay for it and in this case as MySQL is free software in both meanings of the term there is no monetary cost to the product itself. Where the value lies is in the support. Now no-one is every knowingly over sold as against Oracle so presumably Larry & Co. wanted to make some money from said support and if no-one is using the application then that source of revenue has disappeared. Thus MySQL is fast losing any value it once had.

        Well done Oracle. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

        PS. It couldn't have happened to a nastier company.

        1. dssf

          Re: And Agai, Conversely

          Well done, Google. Snatching da feet from the Jaws o' -- oh, won't quite sound right... But, da feet of were spared... And a shark has been speared... Oh, wait... I might have to call on Oracle some day...

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

      3. Muhammad Imran/mi1400

        Re: And Again

        Nokia, Salesforce, Azure are proponents of MySQL. I hate Oracle too but you forum people being the intellects and mantors for youth following you, they expect more rightious writings... not just occupy wallstreat, win8.1 is shit and gay rights advocacy. From early to mid 2000s their is a large number of youth distroyed on hands of mantors in forums and writers who pumped so much air in java balloon that instead small university thrusted C# ppl won and became lords over that java majority. Server2012/R2 are winning, C# guys are prevailing and most Java guys are dragging on roads like once unemployed russian nuclear scientists. pitty is, those java guys even couldnt get chance of reaching that high to go unemployed. Tell your followers that although MySQL is bad.. companies are paying similarly to RedHAT also .. i.e. "support". isnt it happocracy of openshource worshippers!?! also tell them Google and giants want to save millions on that support for "their good", and are injecting poison in you for their pockets. It will be your company paying where mySQL prevails not you as employee. afterall SQLServer is also bought and comissioned in companies... But if Oracle is daviating from the explicit guarantees it gave to EU while buying SUN that it will not derail mySQL and mind it that guarantee took 1 year from oracle to reach EU .. not just oracle masturbated this guarantee of "ya ya okay"... and for that 1 year that SUN buyout deal remained frozen just because of this one product mySQL. This also mean that intellects on forums also saying that EU is a shity org too.

  2. Nate Amsden

    not totally free of Oracle?

    Unless they are not using InnoDB storage engine in mysql ? Last I checked that was probably the most popular engine.

    1. santec

      Re: not totally free of Oracle?

      Nate, InnoDB is GPL, like the rest of the server - which is still used as MariaDB's codebase: they merge most Oracle's development into their trees.

      However, MariaDB uses XtraDB, which is an InnoDB's fork mantained by Percona. It has more bugfixes and is more performant.

    2. Matt Aslett

      Re: not totally free of Oracle?

      MariaDB default is XtraDB, the performance-enhanced fork of InnoDB created by Percona

  3. mrfill
    Megaphone

    OpenSUSE 12.3 has MariaDB as default.

    1. Not That Andrew

      So? Even Slackware has dropped MySQL.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. RAMChYLD

        and,,,

        Last I checked, Arch has also dropped MySQL in favor of MariaDB.

        Now I wonder when will Ubuntu officially make the switch. Granted, I know some of us hate the distro due to the overcommercialization and Marmite UI that is Unity, but then it would be wise to follow the footsteps of other distros who've already packed up their bags.

        As for me tho, I'm primarily a Postgres user, but then a lot of BB software and admins out there seem to prefer MySQL for some reason.

  4. Homer 1
    Mushroom

    Good riddance.

    Looks like Larry "Everyone Else Must Fail" Ellison has just lost all his friends, for some unfathomable reason.

    Well, except his new bestest buddy, Salesfarce.

  5. Paul Graydon

    It's not a rumour

    Fedora has already replaced MySQL with MariaDB as default:

    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ReplaceMySQLwithMariaDB

    RedHat uses Fedora as a test bed. It wouldn't be appearing in RHEL7 without it having been tested on Fedora first.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MariaDB works well for me

    I've been using MariaDB over MySQL for about 6 months now in a production environment and it has worked flawlessly. Couldn't be happier with it, and it has a nice multi-master clustering option called Galera that we might be putting in place soon too.

  7. ARP2

    Glad for the move

    Oracle are a huge pain the arse to work with (legal, pricing, everything) IMO. Anything that dilutes their control over the OS DB market is welcome in my book.

  8. Jonathan 29

    Does Oracle care?

    Maybe I am wrong, but I would have thought Oracle are extremely pleased by all these developments. They would have killed off MySQL a long time ago if they could have gotten away with it, but this splits the community and mitigates the risk that any large corporation is going to embed MySQL too deeply at the expense of their golden child.

    1. Bill the Sys Admin

      Re: Does Oracle care?

      I think your right to be honest. Anyone that buys Oracle DB's don’t buy MySQL support. They buy closed source OracleDB. MySQL will wither away and mariaDB will take over as open source alternative. Meanwhile oracle will keep making lots of money on OracleDB.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Ideologically there are lots of differences" - we don't want to pay a dime to Oracle!

    Did Google get scared its use of MySQL could have not been free under the MySQL license and maybe Oracle could have asked to pay fot those thousands of licenses?

    Widenius will be just very unhappy he can't sell now MariaDB to Google for another $$$$$$$$$$$$$$....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Classic case of a company killing a product for fears of competition with itself

    Oracle lives under the common dilemma: MySQL is free, and its only source of income is support, something Oracle is very weak at doing except in multimillion deals. So they don't have any commercial incentive to encourage MySQL adoption.

    Somewhere along the executive chain, someone at Oracle should have already realized the pattern. It happens all the time, enterprises do not want to sell multiple products that cannibalize themselves. Microsoft did not want to create Windows competitors in the small device market, so they created CE and later RT. RIM (now BB) created a tablet that could not do mail (until too late) Sun did not port Solaris to Intel (until too late) Failures that only helped to increase the market leads of competitors. Like Microsoft, Oracle is retreating back to its "Enterprise" slice of the market that is very, very profitable.

    Without of course realizing that what is on the street *always* ends up being in the business. And when that day comes you've become a legacy burden in the enterprise, not a market leader. It is nonetheless, a fascinating thing to contemplate.

    If you don't want to transform your company for fear of losing your existing business, don't worry: someone else will do it for you. It will not just be your company.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Classic case of a company killing a product for fears of competition with itself

      Being fair to RIM, the problem with the original Playbook wasn't product cannibalisation. It was that secure user accounts could only be associated with one device, so you could not have mail on both phone and Playbook. The other constraints were due to security requirements. At that point, they had not realised that the market for tablets in the secure world was minute, and the only hope of volume sales was a consumer friendly product.

      If the NSA business had broken around the time of the launch of the iPad, history could have been rather different. But for the last three years nobody, seemingly, has cared about security.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Classic case of a company killing a product for fears of competition with itself

      As someone who has to suffer a support contract, I can confirm that Oracle are very weak at support even in multi-million pound deals. Really, truly, horrendously awful unless it's their core Database software. For anything else they acquired or created, you're better off pissing a support ticket in the sand on a desert island somewhere.

      1. Deadlock Victim

        Re: Classic case of a company killing a product for fears of competition with itself

        Even Oracle's support for Oracle is godawful. I had a high-priority "performance is in the toilet, please advise" ticket in for a few days, sent Oracle a half dozen reports they requested and never heard a peep otherwise. Had to spend a few hours digging through trace myself. Thanks Larry!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle is good at developing new products.

    Please stop bashing Oracle. Since it got involved in ocean racing, it has come up with boats which are more than 4 times faster, ten times more expensive and several times more fragile than the previous technology. Larry Ellision can apply his magic to anything.

    1. mikebartnz

      Re: Oracle is good at developing new products.

      Just a shame they are going to get thrashed by Team NZ. Our yacht builders are very happy at the moment.

      If PCLOS doesn't have MariaDB in the repositories shortly I may just go ahead and convert anyway.

      1. dssf

        Re: Oracle is good at developing new products.

        I was just looking at PCLOSmag, trying to find info about PCLOS adn MariaDB. Found nothing in a casual search.

  12. jplza

    "By moving to MariaDB, Google can free itself of any dependence on technology dictated by Oracle – a company whose motivations are unclear, and whose track record for working with the wider technology community is dicey, to say the least. Oracle has controlled MySQL since its acquisition of Sun in 2010, and the key InnoDB storage engine since it got ahold of Innobase in 2005."

    OK, so by switching away from MySQL, suddenly all their Java code becomes what? C#?

    1. SolidSquid

      Java the language isn't owned by Oracle, programming languages in general aren't covered by copyright or patent law. The compiler can be, and that's usually what prevents people using a language without a licence, but since Google built their own Java VM that's not a problem

      1. oldcoder

        Google didn't even make a java VM.

        They use a Dalvic VM, which requires any java bytecode for a JVM to first be translated to Dalvic.

  13. roselan

    "Oracle – a company whose motivations are unclear"

    Oh, Oracle motivations are VERY clear:

    money, money, MONEY!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Oracle – a company whose motivations are unclear"

      Indeed. Didn't I read something recently somewhere about Oracle trying to do something very underhanded and nasty to Google? Something about some sort of bytecode machine that fell off the back of a lorry into Ellison's lap and which he then started trying to bludgeon money out of Google with?

      Well, all I can say is... hahahahahahahhhahahahahahahahaahhaha aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhaha ahahhahaha

  14. Charles 9

    I guess to each his own. If your setup isn't overly complicated, migrating to MariaDB shouldn't break anything. It's designed as a drop-in so everything can be preserved, usually. Mine was simple enough: a few CLI commands and everything ported no sweat. But, your mileage may vary. It's worth at least a look and perhaps some time on a test rig.

  15. rvt

    I am very dissapointed that they didn't migrate to PostgreSQL

    1. Charles 9

      Probably due to architectural differences. Whereas MariaDB is basically a fork of MySQL, designed to be a drop-in replacement, PostgreSQL is a whole other beast which basically means a learning curve.

    2. RoseHosting

      MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL requires more work.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Freeloaders

    What wouldn't you pay for something to fail? Had likes of Google be more cooperative in terms of licensing, Sun could still be an independent entity. Do no evil, huh?

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