GNU/Linux distributions matter, and Debian is one of the most popular ones out there in terms of user base. Its an interesting time as MariaDB Server becomes more divergent compared to upstream MySQL, and people go about choosing default providers of the database.

The MariaDB Server original goals were to be a drop-in replacement. In fact this is how its described (“It is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL”). We all know that its becoming increasingly hard for that line to be used these days.

Anyhow in March 2016, Debian’s release team has made the decision that going forward, MariaDB Server is what people using …

Overview

When I got interested in Docker, I started playing idly with the idea of integrating containers and MySQL Sandbox. My first experiments were not encouraging. Using a container the same way I would use a regular server produced horrible results. I started by creating a Debian or CentOS container, installing MySQL Sandbox, and then importing an expanded tarball into the container. What happens is that tarballs of recent MySQL versions expand to roughly 2 GB of binaries. When you try to put that into a container you get a bloated file system. If you want to expand more than one tarball, you get an enormous unusable blob that is contrary to what containers should be used for. There is, of course, the possibility of using volumes, which would avoid the problem of making the container …

I personally have always enjoyed the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS), but nowadays they have been converted to the Ubuntu Online Summits (UOS). Attending them is not always convenient (timezone issues, might be travelling, etc.) so I watched the recorded video of a session I was interested in: MySQL & Variants in 16.04.

My key takeaways

1. Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus is an LTS release.
2. The term “cross-grade” is used a lot (it is not about downgrading/upgrading, but being able to use MySQL or MariaDB or Percona Server interchangeably)
3. It would be nice to see MySQL 5.7 in this release (for Xenial as well as Debian Stretch). From Oracle there is a new packager taking over the task (Lars)
4. MySQL 5.5 is still the default in Debian, and there needs to be upgrades tested between 5.5 to 5.7 (it …

Congratulations to the entire team at Red Hat, for the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7). The release notes have something important, under Web Servers & Services:

MariaDB 5.5

MariaDB is the default implementation of MySQL in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL database project, and provides a replacement for MySQL. MariaDB preserves API and ABI compatibility with …

You can now find MariaDB 5.2 in your ports tree in FreeBSD. Check out ports/databases/mariadb. Its currently at MariaDB 5.2.4 and the package maintainer will continue updating it as new releases are made. Naturally the documentation in the Knowledgebase has been updated to reflect this.

I`m not the biggest fan of openSUSE but this weeks post by Colin Charles makes me happy ..

openSUSE users can now do a mariadb install from their default repositories.

With all the fuzz about Snoracle and MySQL's future last year to me it became clear that we would end up having different MySQL based distributions, probably with different names, and that it would be up to the Linux distributions to provide the users with what they preferred, working with those Linux distributions
therefore would be very important for the MySQL distributions.

Sadly my Fedora box doesn't allow me to do a yum install mariadb yet ... but I`m sure that's only a matter of time ..

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Gentoo
It started with Brian Evans’ github repository, some good instructions on the mailing list for Building MariaDB on Gentoo, to a request for packaging, and guess what? Its now officially in Gentoo! Thanks Brian, and Robin Johnson!

SPARC builds – Debian, Solaris
Mark has now got a MariaDB category on his blog and the interesting things for you to grab are: …

When I saw Shlomi's post on why not to use apt-get or yum for MySQL, I thought immediately that his conclusions are quite reasonable. What you get from the Linux distributions is not the same thing that you find in the official MySQL downloads page. Now, whether you value more the completeness of the server or the ease of administration through the distribution installation tools, it's up to you and your business goals. We at the MySQL team have organized a meeting with the Linux distributions with the intent of finding out which differences and problems we may have with each other, and to solve them by improving communication. What follows is a summary of what happened in Brussels during the meeting.

…

It’s worth noting that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 has had an update to MySQL in the last month. This naturally means that CentOS 5 also had a similar update. It’s now bumped up to MySQL 5.0.77 (goodbye 5.0.45!; which is what RHEL5 shipped with). This is a moderate security release, so consider updating, if you can afford a mysqld restart.

Read more about the 4 CVE bugs fixed. CentOS followed suit within two weeks.

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Congratulations to the Debian team for releasing Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on Valentine’s Day. This version comes with MySQL 5.0.51a.

I had been pestering Norbert Tretkowski to see when MySQL 5.1 will move from experimental to main, and he told me once Lenny was released. This is because Debian itself needs to make a library transition from libmysqlclient15 to libmysqlclient16, and every package that links to libmysqlclient will need to rebuild against the new version. It couldn’t be done any earlier, and now that Lenny is released, we should start seeing MySQL 5.1 in Debian/unstable, real soon now.

So, if you’re a Debian user, know that you have 5.0.51a in stable (Lenny), 5.0.75 in unstable, and 5.1.31 in …