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My hosting company is now offering MariaDB as an alternative to MySQL. Does anybody know if EE is compatible with MariaDB and if it offers any performance benefits?

https://mariadb.org/

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It absolutely runs fine. Also, who's your hosting company? I'm curious, because i haven't seen very many folks offering Maria yet? – adrienne Nov 30 '12 at 22:00
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Thanks, Adrienne. I use WiredTree for hosting. I've got 2 VPS running, one of which contains the majority (about 15) of my EE sites and another reserved for a single site. – Frequency Dec 1 '12 at 14:50
I'm also on Wired Tree and had them upgrade MySQL to MariaDB. Transition went smoothly and haven't had any issues. – mjr Mar 25 at 2:32

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up vote 8 down vote accepted

I use MariaDB on my home development environment and I love it. MariaDB is completely compatible; it's a fork of the MySQL project by the original creator of MySQL, in fact. (He left the company when it got bought by Sun some years back.) There should be zero issues

As to performance: you will probably see performance gains. It's always hard to say, with databases, without knowing about your specific application usage/traffic patterns/etc. However, MariaDB has made some significant improvements to the query plan optimizer, and the table storage engines are also significantly better in some ways.

As to table storage engines: I recommend using the ARIA engine if you've also got MariaDB running on your local dev environment; it is a good storage engine. If you do not have MariaDB running on all your servers, though, use XtraDB (the InnoDB replacement); exporting ARIA tables could cause headaches on import if you're not importing them to another MariaDB installation. (This is not a problem specific to MariaDB -- it would happen on any MySQL or clone installation that doesn't have the corresponding storage engine installed.)

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I am leaning more towards Percona myself, but agree with adrienne 100%. :) – Nevin Lyne Nov 30 '12 at 23:55
Yeah, Percona and MariaDB are fairly intertwined/similar products. A lot of the same improvements make it into both. :) Thanks for the vote of confidence, @NevinLyne ! – adrienne Dec 1 '12 at 1:55
My primary VPS server would see (and this is very approximate) about 1.2 million pageviews per month and approx 30,000 unique visitors per month. Most of that is to 2 sites one of which is EE. And there would be a mix of EE 1.6.8 and EE 2.5.3 sites on there. – Frequency Dec 1 '12 at 15:01
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I would highly recommend upgrading that EE 1.6.8 site to EE 1.7.3. 1.6.8 will generally throw php errors on php 5.3.x and EE 1.x itself will start no matter the version if you move to php 5.4. There are many other reasons to upgrade from 1.6.8 to 1.7.3 including some security and tons of bug fixes too :) – Nevin Lyne Dec 4 '12 at 15:46
up vote 5 down vote

MariaDB (and Percona MySQL) are drop-in replacements for MySQL, so it's 100% compatible. I would definitely switch to MariaDB, it has huge performance gains. We personally use it (Percona that is, but they are essentially the same thing) on our website (which runs EECMS) and exclusively use Percona MySQL on our hosting servers.

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Thanks Kyle. I'm no database guru so I appreciate the advise from those in the know. – Frequency Dec 1 '12 at 14:52

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