MySQL professional here. I'm quite pleased with Oracle's 5.5 and 5.6 releases, and feel that they're doing a pretty good job. While they've not been perfect stewards, I feel they have done better than Sun -- perhaps you don't remember the fiasco that was the 5.1 release?
I don't feel that this is a trollish opinion. Mark Callaghan, a MySQL luminary who has done a lot of excellent work for the community also has positive things[0] to say about Oracle's stewardship of MySQL.
Yes, they're ok-ish. But the original claim was "MariaDB isn't a replacement for the stock version of MySQL".
Actually yes, it is. It doesn't work the other way around (for example timestamp column has a different description, so dump cannot be loaded into MySQL). But you can use MariaDB in place of MySQL and there should be no performance degradation, since they come from the same codebase.
Reliability was mentioned too - in that case Oracle actually failed by holding back tests. In MariaDB you can reproduce testing if you want. In MySQL not anymore.
No, not really. MariaDB is completely dependent on Oracle and Percona. While they are doing some good work, they are by no means a complete and independent fork, nor do they have the resources to be.
MariaDB is also impacted by the lack of tests, they are absolutely not making replacements for all those tests, and they continue to pull code from upstream. So, same problem there.
This might have been true in 2011-12, but today MariaDB is demonstrably NOT dependent on Oracle or Percona. If both disappeared tomorrow, it would still continue.
The fact that they continue to "pull" some code is because they're not idiots, and aren't going to duplicate effort. As far as I'm aware, they are now being very selective about what they pull.
Calling Oracle an "upstream" is a joke. They aren't publishing atomic changesets, which also means the Oracle fork of MySQL is no longer a morally Open Source software program.
MariaDB is NOT impacted by some vaporous lack of tests. They are building tests for every change they're making. As for the tests privately held by Oracle, well, those tests don't help anyone because they're not public and don't enjoy public scrutiny. Who knows if they're even running them?
They have received large investments from companies like Intel, and have been granted extensive engineering (and probably financial) help from companies like Google and Facebook. Probably many others. And they have most of the MySQL brains-trust in their employ, Monty most famously. I don't know how anyone could argue they're under-resourced for the task of maintaining and improving a mature product.
I don't know how anyone could argue they're under-resourced for the task of maintaining and improving a mature product.
You mean Jeremy Cole, the guy you're arguing with, who led the effort at Google to standardize on MariaDB[0], who worked for many years with Monty at MySQL AB and who is a recognized leader in the MySQL community?[1] Fuck that guy, I have no idea how he could have such an opinion.
I agree, Oracle aren't terrible stewards of MySQL, but that's not my point. Yes 5.5 and 5.6 are good releases. MariaDB 10 is an even better release and shows that Monty has still got value beyond what any large corporation can provide.
I know for a fact that if we were forced away from MariaDB back to stock Oracle MySQL releases, we'd have to expand onto more slaves and fix queries that are no longer optimized.
Obvious troll is obvious.
> the performance is BS
We're extremely happy with our "BS" performance.