MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Paul Graydon]

On 2/6/2012 11:50 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> I'm writing to the greater Debian and Ubuntu community to ask for your
> thoughts on a proposal to drop MySQL in favor of MariaDB. Its clear to
> me that Oracle is not going to do work in the open, and this will become
> a huge support burden for Linux distributions. The recent CVE's had to
> be hunted down and investigated at great difficulty to several people,
> since the KB articles referenced and the internal Oracle bug numbers
> referenced were not available.
>
I would be in agreement with this.  MariaDB is showing significant 
momentum for putting real improvements down.  MySQL seems to be spending 
a lot of time ignoring old bugs (like the microseconds storage bug that 
took them something like 7 years to fix, but every other fork fixed 
quickly).  From an attitude that seemed to start under Sun and get worse 
under Oracle, there are a startling number of old bugs that are just 
languishing around for a disturbing number of years (just looking at 
ones with state Verified : 
http://bugs.mysql.com/search.php?cmd=display&bug_type=Server&status=Verified&os=0&bug_age=0&order_by=date&direction=ASC&limit=100&begin=0 
<http://bugs.mysql.com/search.php?cmd=display&bug_type=Server&status=Verified&os=0&bug_age=0&order_by=date&direction=ASC&limit=100&begin=0>).  
Monty and the MariaDB team are highly responsive, and easy to contact 
through multiple mediums (always folks around in the #mariadb channel on 
Freenode).  They're already doing things like drastically overhauling 
the query engine to finally make things like JOIN statements perform 
significantly faster.

Paul