Webinar Wednesday, January 24, 2018: Differences between MariaDB and MySQL

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents Differences Between MariaDB and MySQL on Wednesday, January 24, 2018, at 7:00 am PST (UTC -8) / 10:00 am EST (UTC -5).

Tags: MariaDB, MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL, DBA, SysAdmin, DevOps
Experience Level: Novice

MariaDB and MySQL. Are they syntactically similar? Where do these two query languages differ? Why would I use one over the other?

MariaDB is on the path of gradually diverging from MySQL. One obvious example is the internal data dictionary currently under development for MySQL 8.0. This is a major change to the way metadata is stored and used within the server. MariaDB doesn’t have an equivalent feature. Implementing this feature could mark the end of datafile-level compatibility between MySQL and MariaDB.

There are also non-technical differences between MySQL and MariaDB, including:

• Licensing: MySQL offers their code as open-source under the GPL, and provides the option of non-GPL commercial distribution in the form of MySQL Enterprise. MariaDB can only use the GPL because they derive their work from the MySQL source code under the terms of that license.
• Support services: Oracle provides technical support, training, certification and consulting for MySQL, while MariaDB has their own support services. Some people will prefer working with smaller companies, as traditionally it affords them more leverage as a customer.
• Community contributions: MariaDB touts the fact that they accept more community contributions than Oracle. Part of the reason for this disparity is that developers like to contribute features, bug fixes and other code without a lot of paperwork overhead (and they complain about the Oracle Contributor Agreement). However, MariaDB has its own MariaDB Contributor Agreement — which more or less serves the same purpose.

Colin will take a look at some of the differences between MariaDB and MySQL and help answer some of the common questions our Database Performance Experts get about the two databases.

Register for the webinar now.

Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist

Colin Charles is the Chief Evangelist at Percona. He was previously on the founding team for MariaDB Server in 2009, worked in MySQL since 2005, and been a MySQL user since 2000. Before joining MySQL, Colin worked actively on the Fedora and OpenOffice.org projects. He’s well-known within many open source communities and speaks on the conference circuit.