Red Hat To Abandon MySQL In Favour Of MariaDB

Red Hat has confirmed it will switch from MySQL to MariaDB in the upcoming release of its Enterprise Linux 7. The release will also include extended support for MongoDB. By extension, both database management systems will be used in CentOS.

The announcement was made at the Red Hat Summit currently taking place in Boston.

Fedora, the community distribution of Red Hat’s OS, had switched to MariaDB earlier this year, at the same time as openSUSE, another popular Linux distribution.

Following Monty

MySQL is the world’s most widely used open source relational database management system, owned by Oracle since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010.

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL, distributed free under the GNU General Public License. It is the brainchild of the original MySQL team and Michael “Monty” Widenius, the co-founder of the company which was sold to Sun in 2008 for $1 billion.

At the moment, Widenius serves as the CEO of Monty Program, which spearheads MariaDB development. SkySQL, a company formed by ex-MySQL executives and investors after Oracle bought MySQL, announced in April 2013 that they were merging with Monty Program and joining the MariaDB Foundation.

Interesting fact: MySQL was named by Widenius after his older daughter, My. MariaDB was named after the younger, Maria. MaxDB, the database management system currently developed by SAP, was also created by Widenius and named after his son Max.

Development of MariaDB was prompted by concerns over Oracle’s ownership of the system. MariaDB has high compatibility with MySQL, with library binary equivalency and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands.

RHEL and CentOS are among the first enterprise Linux distributions to abandon Oracle’s software, and this could be seen as a political move, rather than one prompted by actual benefits of MariaDB.

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