Complete MySQL port with MariaDB

In many past articles, we talked about the goods and bads of an Oracle - Sun merger and how that could affect MySQL's development. In the mean time, MySQL's original founder has gone forward with his personal projects and built upon a branch of MySQL a complete port of the database, based on the Maria storage engine.

After leaving Sun in February 2009, Monty Widenius, MySQL's creator, founded a company called Monty Program Ab to develop in his own vision (not shared by Sun's management) the perfect database storage engine.

Building upon the Maria storage engine, with help from other Sun employees and community members, the company released in February 2010, a year after Monty left Sun  the first RC (release-candidate) of MariaDB. Adding to the previous release, Monty Program Ab recently launched a complete port of all of MySQL's features in their latest MariaDB release, 5.1.42.

This MariaDB version incorporates all of MySQL's 5.1.42 functionalities, plus some of its own features. The goal of the MariaDB project is, according to Mr. Widenius, to completely support all of MySQL, cloning all of its features, plus adding all the community desired features which are rejected or kept in limbo thanks to Oracle's bureaucracy.

Future releases of MySQL, per example MySQL 5.3.xx will spurn MariaDB 5.3.xx releases which will incorporate all of the new additions, plus new improvements added by the MariaDB team.

For now, the first official release of MariaDB has implemented XtraDB in the place of InnoDB, replacing the storage engine currently owned by Oracle with a community free version of XtraDB which saw massive improvements from Percona and Google.

Other important enhancements include the PBXT transactional storage engine and the FederateX pluggable storage engine to replace the old MySQL Federated engine developed by Sun.

MariaDB has been warmly greeted by the open-source community, but as the market develops, it’s more and more clear that the Internet is moving out of the relational database-driven websites to the NoSQL trend, spearheaded by Apache's Hadoop Hbase, Google's BigTable, Amazon's Dynamo and Facebook's Cassandra DB.

As for MariaDB's hopes of entering the enterprise market and replacing MySQL, it may be a little bit late, Greenplum already beating it to the punch, many experts ranking Greenplum higher than MySQL in many performance indicators.

MariaDB 5.1.42 is available for download here.

MySQL 5.1.42 is available for download here.

Apache Cassandra is available for download here.

Apache Hadoop HBase is available for download here.