Google waves goodbye to MySQL
Google has now switched to MariaDB and dumped MySQL. “For the Web community, Google’s big move might be a paradigm shift in the DBMS ecosystem,” said a Google engineer. Major Linux distributions, like Red Hat and SUSE, and wellknown websites such as Wikipedia, have also switched from MySQL to MariaDB. This is a great blow to MySQL.
Google has migrated applications that were previously
running on MySQL on to MariaDB without changing the application code. There are five Google technicians working parttime on MariaDB patches and bug fixes, and Google continues to maintain its internal branch of MySQL to have complete control over the improvement. Google running thousands of MariaDB servers can only be good news for those who feel more comfortable with a non-Oracle future for MySQL.
Though multinational corporations like Google have switched to MariaDB, it does have a few shortcomings. MariaDB’s performance is slightly better in multi-core machines, but one suspects that MySQL could be tweaked to match the performance. All it requires is for Oracle to improve MySQL by adding some new features that are not present in MariaDB, yet. And then it will be difficult to switch back to the previous database.
MariaDB has the advantage of being bigger in terms of the number of users, than its forks and clones. MySQL took a lot of time and effort before emerging as the choice of many companies. So, it is a little hard to introduce MariaDB in the commercial field. Being a new open source standard, we can only hope that MariaDB will overtake other databases in a short span of time.