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There Is No Reason At All To Use MySQL: MariaDB, MySQL Founder Michael Widenius
sfcrazy writes "In this exclusive interview MySQL founder Michael Widenius talks about the reasons of decline of MySQL, what Oracle is doing wrong and how MariaDB is fast replacing it. There are quite some interesting information in this interview. The take out of this interview is '...there is no reason at all to use MySQL 5.5 instead of MariaDB 5.5. The same will be true for the next generation.'"
Of course, he has an economic interest in getting people to use MariaDB. Hard to argue that Oracle isn't evil though.
The Maria builds have not been particularly special, and its hard to take anything he says about MySQL seriously. So much doublespeak. Stop posting his rants as relevant or news. This is little more than an ad for his support/consulting org.
Most MySQL/MariaDB users wont care at all about this, because there are millions of them who are not Slashdot or Amazon or Facebook - this DB silently powers millions of Internet connected things, and it's just a given that it works, performs, has fit-for-purpose stability. It's a sign of how far OSS has come when people have the luxury of quibbling over WHICH free, capable DB they want to base their business model on.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Michael Widenius has benefited from gathering millions of developers around his product and letting them down.
He cannot sell source code of MariaDB this time, but he still can sell the brand name and the community which has trusted him again to earn another fortune. Fool me once, full me twice...
The main reason to stay away from PostgreSQL is its toolset. Specifically, it's almost impossible to find a tool that allows you to analyze and tune it's performance. I say 'almost' because there may be one out there that I haven't found...but I've looked on and off for years, with no results.
For mysql there's lots of tools, like jetprofiler. For oracle you can pay. For SQLite, well, who cares. For psql, it's (as one website put it) a black art. Do you really want that as your back end?
Firebird is trivially embedded with almost zero configuration requirements, yet scales up well and is pretty feature rich. It's a very good option when you think Postgres is overkill.