Upcoming Webinar Tuesday September 12: Differences between MariaDB® and MySQL®

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles (@bytebot) as he presents Differences Between MariaDB and MySQL on Tuesday, September 12, 2017, at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

 

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

MariaDB is on the path to gradually diverge from MySQL. One obvious example is the internal data dictionary currently under development for MySQL 8. This is a major change to the way metadata is stored and used within the server, and 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 their work is derived 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.

You can register for the webinar here.

Colin Charles, Percona Chief Evangelist

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