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Red Hat Ditches MySQL, Switches To MariaDB
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released. MySQL's first employee in Australia, Arjen Lentz, said Fedora and OpenSuSE were community driven, whereas RHEL's switch to MariaDB was a corporate decision with far-reaching implications. 'I presume there is not much love lost between Red Hat and Oracle (particularly since the "Oracle Linux" stuff started) but I'm pretty sure this move won't make Oracle any happier,' said Lentz, who now runs his own consultancy, Open Query, from Queensland. 'Thus it's a serious move in political terms.' He said that in practical terms, MariaDB should now get much more of a public footprint with people (people knowing about MariaDB and it being a/the replacement for MySQL), and direct acceptance both by individual users and corporates."
We're nobody's bitch.
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The main thing Oracle Linux does is run a newer kernel version than the RHEL kernel. RHEL6 for example is based on 2.6.32, while Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R.2 (pdf) was running 3.0.16 when they last updated things.
Grabbing the newer kernel lets Oracle win direct performance shootouts against RedHat. They can get away with it because the only applications they're testing on it is Oracle, so if the upstream kernel breaks other things they don't care. RedHat cares about all of their supported software, so they have a lot more QA issues to deal with. Note that this little trick is also how Oracle has gotten around caring that RedHat made it harder to see what individual patches they apply to the upstream kernel in their release. They aren't using that version of kernel at all, so whatever RedHat is doing to customer their 2.6.32 branch they're ignoring.
Of course, if you're willing to do this, you can easily grab a newer Linux kernel from kernel.org yourself on regular RHEL, too. The game Oracle is playing with "Unbreakable Linux" is all marketing hype.
You do realize that they were the ones who sold MySQL to Oracle in the first place, right ?
No. Open source people never sold MySQL to Oracle.
What happened is that Monty sold MySQL to Sun, with a clause that it must not be sold to Oracle.
Oracle then bought Sun.
I'm pretty sure Oracle couldn't care less if RedHat uses MySQL or MariaDB since it doesn't benefit greatly from either. Oracle would much rather have everyone using Oracle DB since that is where they put most of their development and support efforts and that is what makes them their money. I don't think Oracle would even continue to offer MySQL support if they weren't ordered to do so under the conditions of their buyout of Sun.