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Wikipedia Moved To MariaDB 5.5
Peetke writes "As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community. Long standing OSS supporter Wikipedia has now moved from an optimized fork of MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5, for both its English and German sites. Wikipedia expects all other languages to follow within a month. Performance-wise, this move has no big implications, but it will ensure our biggest community database will live long and prosper."
For more information, Wikipedia has a statement regarding MariaDB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Is slashdot next?!?!?!
What Oracle has done in the past and how they operate their business in general I think.
Not moving now, is ensuring Oracle will screw you. Why wait for it to happen?
RTFA.
It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.
Replacing one database named after one of the author's daughters, with a database named after another of the author's daughters. Seems pretty consistent to me.
"As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community." This is a bit weasely. We all don't know any such thing. For example, Oracle was in the top ten of organisations that contributed code to Linux last year: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2012/04/linux-foundation-releases-annual-linux-development-report Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux, and made several large contributions from that front. Shucks, it's even got its own OSS portal: https://oss.oracle.com/ I'm happy to agree it's a big bad corporate beast and does a lot of wrong in the world, but if you're going to criticize it, at least be factual.
"Oracle may screw MySQL".
Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?
One definition of madness is to try the same thing again and again and keep expecting different results. It's Oracle. You will get screwed.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Please point out the projects it contributed to?
OpenOffice is dead and shipped off to apache, MySQL is stagnating, Oracle linux is nothing but a Redhat clone with no changes but copyright names change. Oracle is not a friend to open source. Never been either.
MariaDB has quite a few improvements over MySQL. More information here: https://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-features/
Note that this does not address the specific storage backend features, which are quite attractive on their own. There are even plans to revive a key-value store backend at some point.
Said improvements may or may not be a factor in their decision to move, but it's almost a completely drop-in replacement. So the real question would by why not. Simply having it running on my servers gives me that clean and tidy feeling. You know the one I mean.
The philosophy is sound. Open Source has a future beyond the fall of any individual enterprise
Btrfs, VirtualBox, Java. Just to mention a few.
Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?
The performance increases were negligible (with some decreases, as well) so: No reason to switch other than a symbolic statement and to avoid any potential future licencing issues or litigation. The MariaDB project will mirror the free-as-in-beer (and maybe paid?) features of future MySQL versions while aiming to be a "drop-in" replacement. On the other hand, it's better to do it now in case the projects do diverge and the MySQL upgrade path becomes problematic or expensive.
It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.
Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.
Philosophy - maybe - however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS - more than a lot of companies - See: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/technical-contributions-1689636.html
In a nutshell, they are working on NFS over IPv6, data integrity checks for ext3, they maintain libstdc++, they worked hard on BTRFS, If anything, they have helped open source much more than most other companies.
Again, I don't see the philosophical reasons other than 'because we can'.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Java was already open source when Oracle bought Sun. And since then, Oracle has been trying to close it back again with bullshit patent claims.
The first daughter's name is MySQL? I should introduce her to my nephew, little Tommy ;'Drop Tables.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Her name is just My.
Right, they couldn't possibly have a good reason for doing it.
So an organization who asks for donations, waste their money changing Database systems for the sole purpose that they didn't like the company that bought the old one, although they didn't show any signs that they are going to damage the product or make it worse for them in any ways? Sounds like a wast of donated money to me.
So you didn't RTFA???
For our most common query type, 95th percentile times over an 8-hour period dropped from 56ms to 43ms and the average from 15.4ms to 12.7ms. 50th percentile times remained a bit better with the 5.1-facebook build over the sample period, 0.185ms vs. 0.194ms. Many query types were 4-15% faster with MariaDB 5.5.30 under production load, a few were 5% slower, and nothing appeared aberrant beyond those bounds.
Better performance on such a heavy traffic site is neither a waste of time nor money! ;-)
Since Oracle took over MySQL they've shown they routinely delay releasing patches for CVE security flaws for months until they can all be released together without documenting what fixes what issue. Several times updates have either ignore issues, removed fixes to earlier ones or in at least on case I remember applied a fix for an issue which failed to fix it and actually introduced a new one. This despite multiple FOSS projects (Debian,RHEL,MariaDB,Percona) having developed working patches separately which Oracle chose not to use.
They also don't disclose the details of many security vulnerabilities. That sounds reasonable on first glance, but it makes it a nightmare for sysadmins to assess whether it is worth system downtime to apply a patch, especially when that means upgrading to a newer DB version not tested against the application and which might break the application in several cases (for example due to the newer reserved keywords lists). A firewall or other measures may be sufficient to mitigate the threat, but that can't be assessed without seeing the details.
Replacing one database named after one of the author's daughters, with a database named after another of the author's daughters. Seems pretty consistent to me.
Well I guess we are talking about the fifth generation of Maria's then. They certainly know how to procreate!
Oracle has a few employees that are solid OSS contributors, and apparently they have some management support. That's been true for years (e.g. their OCFS filesystem...). However, they're only an OSS contributor in a tactical sense. Many years ago (and much earlier than one would've expected!) they came to the realization that Linux was the future (or at least, a large chunk of the future) in the server space, and they made the very smart tactical decision that they didn't want to be relegated to a dusty corner where their products only ran (well) on legacy Sparc/Solaris, HP/UX, IBM AIX, etc environments. So they made their core Oracle products work on Linux, and as a part of doing that job fully and trying to make their stuff really shine on Linux, they necessarily had to get involved in the OSS community.
Later came the MySQL acquisition, which was another tactical decision along the lines of "Well, that worked great and we retained our corporate Oracle customers that wanted to move from Sparc/Solaris (etc) to x86/Linux, but... we can't get all these exiting Linux/OSS users to adopt Oracle because MySQL works well enough for them and its free, so lets take over MySQL too and own the Linux relational database space".
It's all tactical, and it's all designed to corner the market on relational databases (and various other bits that go on top of them) as hard as they can. Philosophically, as an organization, Oracle doesn't have any real interest in promoting Open Source or doing right by the community. Their vision isn't long-term enough for that. It was just barely medium-term enough to make the right calls to get involved in OSS at all. Their big-picture motivation isn't "Build awesome free software for the world to share", it's "Let's find a way to trap all these Linuxy people into paying us for something".
Otherwise, otherwise... in my country (France) there is a nice saying, 'Les conseilleurs ne sont pas les payeurs', that basically describes you.
(attempt at translating: 'Most prominent advisors are generally not the investors to begin with')
Herve S.
Ummmm... that's not what happened. They weren't using a stock release of MySQL. They were using an old 5.1 fork that Facebook created and has been maintaining. They decided they wanted the enhancements that the newer releases offered, and had a choice of migrating to a newer release of MySQL, or migrating to a newer release of MariaDB. Either way, they were migrating and had to put forth the effort to do so.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
As a WIkipedia donor .. I support this move. I got nothing against Oracle, but why would they use a database that is not the flagship database of the company? It's bound to cost more and lack features. MariaDB is owned by a foundation with goals more in line with Wikipedia.
They aren't changing database systems. They are upgrading to the latest mainline version of the database they were already using. Don't be confused by the name change: MariaDB is a recent fork of MySQL where most (all?) new open development occurs. See MariaDB for the relevant history. Basically, "switching" from MySQL to MariaDB is like "switching" from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice or from XFree86 to Xorg. MySQL got taken over by Oracle so the real development was forked with the new name of MariaDB.
Wikipedia was using a non-Oracle fork of MySQL (a Facebook maintained fork of MySQL 5.1) and moved to a different non-Oracle fork (MariaDB). The comment about Oracle not being a friend of OSS seems to be a non-sequitur.
Even if they are volunteers they could be working on doing something else that may have saved them money.
Have you ever managed volunteers? They work on what they want to work on. You can't just reassign them to a task they don't like, or they will walk away and donate their time to some other organization. Most likely they had some MariaDB fanboi (or fangoil) who was willing to do this, but was not willing to upgrade MySQL instead.
He also has a son named Max: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB
Not only this (but please mod up anyway!), but as far as I know MariaDB is compatible with plugins designed for a comparable version of MySQL. At least for my Django and PHP work this holds true. I mean, isn't this the reason most developers abstract the database library anyway?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
If well MariaDB is backward compatible with MySQL, have some advantages on its own, like more choices for storage engines (i.e. Aria as a better myisam than myisam, xtradb instead of innodb, and others), and should have better performance in general than Mysql for the same equivalent version in the same hardware.
That Oracle is being bad right now with their concept of "open" (like suing Google for using Java) is an extra motivation.
And a dog named "Mongo".
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Doubtful. More likely they wanted to be able to get decent community support for the forseeable future. Something that's not a given for a previously community-based software product that got gobbled up by a succession of commercial entities.
Oracle has gone to great lengths to make MySQL a second-class citizen to its own database in terms of support, and worse, they're not really getting the whole community part of why people used MySQL in the first place...or maybe they *do* get it and just want MySQL to go away so they can sell Oracle DB.
Either way, the folks at Wikipedia must have seen value in moving to a compatible, open-source, community-based database...just like the one they started with.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Does the reason matter so long as they do it?
Yes because it means their support is shakey and their motivations can swing them in another direction at any time. Oracle can sabotage any project they are a part of and knowing who their CEO is should make people wary of them.
I'm not a purist but I get where the purists come from when it comes to Oracle. I don't trust them and I don't give them my money.
I don't understand why people trust MariaDB either. The result the last time everyone jumped onto Monty's open-source ship? He cashed out and put all of his customers on a road that led to being screwed by Oracle. There's a bit of madness expecting different results adopting MariaDB I wouldn't buy into either.
Hint: when a contributor agreement like the MariaDB one says copyright must be assigned to "Monty Program AB", your contributors are usually being setup so that the owner of that copyright can then profit from the community's free work on the project, a decision that will be motivated by what's best for them. There are a few software projects that require copyright assignment that aren't doing that, like the gnu projects. Monty Program AB is not a non-profit with a decades long history of anti-commercialism like gnu though. It's a regular company run by someone who has screwed both his paying customers and his open-source user community exactly this way once. Why are people signing up such that he could do it again?
I kid you not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius :)
Larry kills another one. Are there any "open" OSS projects left at Oracle?
Organization? You must be joking..
Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".
You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
What does that have to do with FOSS? Its actually quite simple in that for every decent programming job you have a dozen shitty jobs which is why companies like Apple, MSFT, and even Red Hat have to offer competitive salaries, because nobody wants to do a shitty job for free. But sadly when you are talking about a project run SOLELY with volunteers you just won't see those jobs get done, nobody wants to fix the busted shitters. Don't take my word for it, go look at the bug tracker of any major distro...do you have bugs that are TWO years old? THREE years old? Do I hear FOUR? The bug tracker will have bugs as old as the distro itself because those bugs are shitty and would take a hell of a lot of work to fix and thus don't get done.
In a way its a lot like communism in on the surface communism sounds great, I mean everybody working together to make their their lives and the world a better place? How could that be bad? Well what you end up with is a billion artists and nobody doing the job cleaning up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. It got so bad that the USSR had to actually assign soldiers to "potato duty" which was all the shitty jobs they couldn't get the people to do, but large FOSS projects don't have that luxury.
I'm sure every programmer here will instantly mod me down because they don't like to think that their job is shitty, but c'mon dudes, it really is. Bug hunts, regression testing, writing docs, dealing with those little weird errors that just seem to pop up in corner cases and are maddening to track down...those are shitty jobs. This is why you see so many new releases in FOSS when the previous one hasn't even had half the bugs fixed so they are adding new bugs onto old bugs because writing new programs? That is enjoyable, making something with your own two hands is something we humans have enjoyed and took pleasure in for thousands of years, being the guy that has to widen the ditch because the sewage is backing up? Not so much.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And what is wrong with that? Give old Monty some credit, the man managed to sell the product and keep it at the same time so at the end of the day all the corp ended up with was a now worthless name! That is fucking brilliant! How he managed to get the corp to agree to buy without a non compete clause i don't know, probably by being just that fucking slick, but its a trick worthy of playing the WB "sucker!" music at Oracle, damned smart if you ask me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, MariaDB tested as fast or faster, or they wouldn't have made the move.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".
You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
Which is why your "busted shitter problem" works the opposite way in FLOSS. Because when a FLOSS shitter breaks, it's not just you, it's a whole mess of people. Some of them are willing to pay to have the problem fixed, and some might even be capable of cleaning the shit off themselves. When ONE of them does fix the issue, then then everyone's busted shitter is fixed all at once. Compare this to a proprietary shitter than no one is allowed to fix but the shitter manufacturer: You have to wait on a specialist to come out with a fix, if they find it in THEIR interest to fix it... So, that's why Linux is better and faster than Microsoft is at patching OS vulnerabilities -- Linux, a successful project that runs damn near every web server on the planet, and powers the most smartphones as well, I might add. The many successful FLOSS projects that are bigger than a handful of devs does not completely obliterate your points, but makes you look pretty damn foolish, IMO.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that a core team of maintainers should be small. When starting out these maintainers are also developers. However, when the project gets bigger it's restructured so that devs get to keep developing and maintainers just merge and test and verify, etc. Lather rinse and repeat. Linux is successful because the dev became a maintainer quickly and let others do the dirty work. Protip: Linus doesn't write much code these days, but every kernel patch still crosses his desk. Ballmer and the late Jobs could only dream of such levels of control... Aside: What happens when Linus dies or quits? He's already set up the system of trust so that anyone can now replace him immediately.
This flexibility and scalability in structure is something that all companies should take a look into. Many are doing so. Some, companies are letting users fix their broken shitters for free to the benefit of all. Others claim control over all shiter functions, and thus become synonymous with their broken shit.
<Something something> communism <something something>FOSS
<more communism>
It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre and Sigil. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.
In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.
The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!