Happy First Day of Spring!
We would like to thank-you for being a Stream101 client! As part of our dedicating to keeping our services at the top quality and cutting edge, we have elected to migrate away from MySQL and move to MariaDB. NOTE: This only affects customers utilizing MySQL Databases.
What is MariaDB?
MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system. It is notable for being led by the original developers of MySQL, who forked it due to concerns over its (MySQL’s) acquisition by Oracle. MariaDB intends to maintain high compatibility with MySQL, ensuring a “drop-in” replacement capability with library binary equivalency and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands. It includes the XtraDB storage engine for replacing InnoDB, as well as a new storage engine, Aria, that intends to be both a transactional and non-transactional engine perhaps even included in future versions of MySQL.
What do I need to know?
The biggest thing for our customers to understand is some of the changes that will be happening when switching over to MariaDB. Many outdated software will not be able to utilize the speed enhancements of MariaDB, however most backwards compatibility will remain. We are currently running MySQL 5.6 on all of our hosting servers now, and most features should transfer over. As always, it is recommended that our clients keep their software as up to date as possible for both performance and security reasons.
This link will give you some information regarding the feature comparison chart of MariaDB and MySQL: https://mariadb.com/blog/mariadb-10-vs-mysql-56-feature-comparison-update
Will my software that uses MySQL be compatible?
Most of the time, yes. MariaDB utilizes a lot of backwards compatibility (just as MySQL 5.6 did for the previous versions of MySQL). As mentioned above, you should really ensure your software is updated to the latest version as many security and performance enhancements most likely would have occured. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee compatibility for each and every software, so our advice is to contact your software vendor and ask.
When will this change occur?
Our current plans are for this change to take effect on May 1st, 2016 at 8AM.
How long with the migration take?
We have done extensive testing and preparations in our Sandbox environment, and most migrations took less that 15 minutes with replications of the current live data.
Have more questions?
Put a ticket into the Support Department and we’ll be able to point you in the right direction.
Thanks again for being a wonderful Stream101 customer and enjoy your first day of Spring!
Kevin Frank
Head Systems Engineer – Stream101
