MariaDB has become a turning point in the fate of MySQL?

BKJIA toutiao: At the time Sun Microsystems was about to buy, a group of programmers who once participated in the development of the famous open source database MySQL decided to create a new project named MariaDB.

MariaDB Logo

The new project was named and led by Michael "Monty" Widenius. The original developer and co-founder of the MySQL project gave up the solicitation of Oracle and started from scratch. After leaving Sun, he established a company, Monty Program AB, in his hometown of Holland, to manage the development of the MariaDB project. At the same time, he opened his arms to the MySQL technical experts. Soon afterwards, Monty Progam had a strong development team.

Maybe you don't know about it, but they have been working all the time. MariaDB experienced unprecedented competition pressure as Oracle showed great enthusiasm for MySQL development after acquiring Sun assets. However, the confrontation between outstanding talents has helped MariaDB gain a firm foothold. In a report on the evaluation of the six open source databases published by the Network World website, we found that MariaDB was the most popular database solution. Monty told me that MariaDB has a R & D advantage of about 30 people working year compared with MySQL, And Monty Program also agrees with the adequacy of its own products-especially in terms of security repair.

Quick correction is the key

Monty tells us that the MariaDB development team has been working with mitre.org to ensure that all security issues can be rapidly developed, reported, and described in detail. Since Oracle no longer publishes Security repair details, the MariaDB team usually needs to reverse engineer the patches from MySQL to find the objects to fix. Once the status is clear, these patches will be merged and provide services for MariaDB. Monty says "MariaDB can be considered the most secure MySQL version"-this statement is rather bold.

Although MariaDB and MySQL have to be kept strictly confidential before the new version is released, however, the recent incident exposed the differences between the two sides in the security response mechanism and response speed. As soon as the problem was exposed, MariaDB took action and used open and recorded open-source patches within a few days to complete the repair work. In contrast, MySQL now has a deadline) these security vulnerabilities are still not fixed.

This is nothing new. Oracle has been complaining about the preferential participation of Enterprise Resources in and the handling of MySQL Community Affairs. The results are of course obvious: withdrawal of related processes to other development projects and delay the repair of security vulnerabilities, all this makes the communication between the project team and the MySQL ecosystem increasingly worse. I once had a conversation with MySQL and MariaDB's external ecosystem partners, and they all expressed helplessness for Oracle's strong style.

In this dilemma, the news from last week is undoubtedly a big positive news: The MariaDB Foundation was formally established, and the MySQL open source community is expected to enter a new stage of development. MariaDB-from the perspective of MySQL-finally had a dedicated institutional system, and the emergence of the Foundation would in one fell swoop reverse the passive state of development and control.

Affected Ecosystem

What does this mean for the MySQL ecosystem? First, MySQL will improve its packaging and integration capabilities. Obviously, open projects such as MariaDB are much more convenient to use than a database solution created by a company for its own business. In the future, we will probably see MariaDB included in the Linux release, and may also find it in LAMP deployment. After MariaDB replaces traditional MySQL, we can still use the 'M' letter ).

Second, the possibility of innovation will also be greatly increased. A developer once told me that MariaDB has some very attractive development potential-supporting OLTP, OLAP, data-centric professional processing solutions, and highly scalable multi-control clusters. This diversified development direction means that the project needs to accept information and opinions from various aspects. The establishment of the Foundation provides developers with a transparent management platform, its basic features open to everyone have a very far-reaching positive significance for the entire project.

Third, effectively improve the project Competitiveness. MariaDB recently announced a set of highly compatible client libraries, fully use LGPL to rewrite from scratch to replace the GPL used in MySQL and its derivative versions. Now both MariaDB and MySQL will benefit from this. As Arjen Lenz, a member of the community, said in his comment, this is of great significance to the dual licensing issue. Now commercial users no longer have to purchase a proprietary license for MySQL to avoid additional GPL compliance management needs.

By combining the three factors, MariaDB absolutely has the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in the large and large MySQL market, with its unique charm. Monty tells us that many enterprise giants have appeared in the Code contributors of the MariaDB project, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, in addition, there are often hundreds of online users on the IRC communication platform designed for developers.

Although the situation is good, it is not everything. A portion of the MySQL ecosystem seems completely unaffected: the Drizzle project aims to re-design a smaller, more modular microkernel for cloud deployment. Brian Aker, founder of the project, expressed his disdain for the Foundation on Twitter and announced via email that he would stay on the sidelines. The Drizzle project already has its own set of non-GPL client libraries-although not fully compatible-And Aker thinks that the JDBC driver used by MariaDB is the Java database connection) to some extent, it comes from Drizzle's BSD license, while MariaDB uses LGPL ).

In any large technical community, different opinions are inevitable, so we don't need to worry too much about this arrogant atmosphere. I believe that with good execution, the MariaDB foundation is likely to inject new activities into the MySQL Community and achieve another round of innovation and business growth. It is not easy to achieve this goal, but the potential of the Project is equally impressive. MySQL has become an important cornerstone in the history of open source, and MariaDB is likely to become another monument in the future.

Http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/the-mariadb-foundation-turning-point-mysql-209168

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