Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
• Those who are facing a specific problem that can't be solved without a source code
modification
• Those who distrust Oracle's stewardship of MySQL
3
and feel happier with a variant
that they regard as being truly open-source
Why would you choose any specific fork? We'd summarize it as follows. If you want
to stay as close as possible to official MySQL, but get better performance, instrumen-
tation, and helpful features, choose Percona Server. Choose MariaDB if you are more
comfortable with big changes to the server, or if you want a broader range of community
contributions such as additional storage engines. Choose Drizzle if you want a lean,
stripped-down database server and you don't mind that it's not compatible with
MySQL, or if you want to be able to make your own enhancements to the database
much more easily.
How popular are the forks and variants? Nobody really knows, but one thing we all
agree on is that if you add together all the deployments of unofficial MySQL versions,
they constitute only a tiny fraction of the number of official MySQL deployments in
the world. In terms of relative popularity, we're biased because many of our customers
choose to use Percona Server, but from what we've see deployed “in the wild,” Percona
Server appears to be the most popular, followed by MariaDB.
Speaking of Percona, in general all of the service providers have a lot of experience with
the official MySQL, but naturally Percona has the most experts in working with Percona
Server, and Monty Program is correspondingly the most familiar with MariaDB. This
matters a lot when you're looking for bug-fix support contracts. Only Oracle can guar-
antee that a bug will be fixed in the official MySQL releases; other vendors can provide
fixes but have no power to get them included in the official releases. This is one answer
to the question of why to choose a fork: some people choose one of the forks simply
because it is the version of MySQL that their service provider controls fully and can
conveniently fix and enhance.
3. As we explained in
Chapter 1
, we are actually quite happy with Oracle as MySQL's owner
