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> The company won praise from analysts for the engineering behind the products. A bit like a McDonalds fan praising an upmarket restaurant on the quality of th

by jarym 3y ago

> The company won praise from analysts for the engineering behind the products. A bit like a McDonalds fan praising an upmarket restaurant on the quality of their food. Ok, bit of a cheapshot. In seriousness, I never fully understood MariaDB - there may have been a concern about Oracle's plans for MySQL but was that really enough to start a for-profit corporation? And in the meantime, the big cloud vendors did a decent job of offering their own SQL options. And then we have Postgres - it was always technologically superior to MySQL but over the past few years its become as easy to deploy and run as MySQL was. I just don't see what segment or differentiator remained for MariaDB as a for-profit corporation.

ekianjo 3y ago
MariaDB is for companies that rely on MySQL and don't want to migrate to a non-MySQL solution, for various reasons.
zmxz 3y ago
[flagged]
traceroute66 3y ago
> concern about Oracle's plans for MySQL but was that really enough to start a for-profit corporation Perhaps even more so because Percona already pre-dated MariaDB. Also as I understand it Percona is much closer to Oracle MySQL than MariaDB because MariaDB was a point-in-time fork on 5.5.
samlambert 3y ago
I see the “Postgres is technology superior” take on hn all the time. Can you actually back that up? Can you explain why the dozens or so Postgres scale up solutions don’t use real Postgres? Or why anyone at scale with Postgres migrates away? https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ This outage would have been a lot less likely with MySQL because of redo logs which MySQL has had for a decade. But Postgres replication is under developed. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-datab... Facebook has evaluated every database on the planet and still uses MySQL. https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/core-infra/mysql/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/core-infra/mysql/ When MySQL has more users, can scale significantly more, runs some of the largest sites on earth, and even lends its storage engine to other databases like Dynamo you should backup your claims that Postgres is technically superior. Please.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Yes, Postgres is a toy database that can't do replication correctly. You are not wrong.
  - keep_reading 3y ago
    Postgres replication features have lagged behind but were never dangerous. MySQL has multiple edge cases where things on the master will not happen on the slave depending on which replication method you've selected and which features you're using. MySQL is the issue here.
- bbatha 3y ago
  Postgres still has a ways to go for scale but has improved substantially in replication options since that 2017 article. Sharding has also seen a lot of upstream patches from enterprise db and other commercial providers since then. Upgrades in particular are still a sore spot. Also note that folks aren’t running giant vanilla MySQL clusters. They’re running it through vitess or home grown tools with similar functionality. Finally MySQL gets performance in these large setups by turning off features like foreign keys, acid guarantees etc. it’s awesome and powerful that you can do this in MySQL but it’s not apples to apples here. MySQL has also improved a lot on these dimensions in the last few years. The other reality here is that on nvme hardware with a few tb of ram you can get away with a basic reader writer replica setup for a long time.
  - samlambert 3y ago
    Vanilla MySQL vs vanilla Postgres. MySQL still wins on scale. You run single MySQL servers with 70,000 connections, you can't get close on Postgres because of a fundamentally broken connection-per-process model. The Neon team suggested changing that and got flamed by the community. I was at GitHub in 2017 when that GitLab outage happened. We had 60 million users running on vanilla MySQL no Vitess at that point. We had 10 million users literally running on 3 MySQL servers. Don't pretend that even now Postgres can do that.
    - 3y ago
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> ... it was always technologically superior to MySQL No, it wasn't, and still isn't. MySQL supports replication correctly and out of the box, Postgres still hasn't figured this out. (Replication is the #1 important feature for any setup that is larger than one server.)
- junon 3y ago
  > Replication is the #1 important feature for any setup that is larger than one server That's... just replication. And postgres handles replication fine in my experience, I could in fact say the opposite about MySQL. What issues do you have with it?
  - samlambert 3y ago
    Please do say the opposite about MySQL. Tell us what is wrong with it? Linkedin use MySQL replication to ship data across regions and rebuild caches the other side because other protocols are too unreliable. Postgres documents that their replication protocol can lose committed transactions. https://patroni.readthedocs.io/en/latest/replication_modes.html https://patroni.readthedocs.io/en/latest/replication_modes.h... Looking real good.
    - jvdongen 3y ago
      This is a disingenuous comment at best. As explained in the docs you link to, Postgres has both synchronous and asynchronous replication modes. In asynchronous mode availability is favored over durability. Which means commits can get lost when the primary goes down in an uncontrolled fashion. In sync mode that will not happen at a cost to some performance. It’s the same trade-off any distributed system has to make, and the user gets to make the choice.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        MySQL can actually do one better which is semisync. The transactions get replicated synchronously but applying them is async. You can't lose data anymore due to a primary failure.
optymizer 3y ago
10-15 years ago, the MySQL cli has was far more user friendly than PostgreSQL. I don't remember the specifics, but I found postgres pedantic and lacking shortcuts that made life easier. That said I liked PHP too.
nickstinemates 3y ago
There's hundreds of thousands of small companies out there that run a mariadb database that needs support. That's who mariadb sells to. Consequently, they have a lot of very small customers all over the world.
- tpetry 3y ago
  But MariaDB is not selling to them. They are now only selling their enterprise version of MariaDB with ”Contact Us“ pricing. So those hundreds of thousands companies will not be a paying customer.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    MariaDB is selling to them via a subscription license, not through SkySQL / their cloud offering and has been for a long time.
treprinum 3y ago
Sun Microsystems paid some billion to MySQL authors that then decided to have more fun with MariaDB and started to compete with Sun/later Oracle again. Not sure where did the billion go if MariaDB is now in need to raise debt...

by jarym 3y ago

ekianjo 3y ago

MariaDB is for companies that rely on MySQL and don't want to migrate to a non-MySQL solution, for various reasons.

zmxz 3y ago

[flagged]

traceroute66 3y ago

> concern about Oracle's plans for MySQL but was that really enough to start a for-profit corporation Perhaps even more so because Percona already pre-dated MariaDB. Also as I understand it Percona is much closer to Oracle MySQL than MariaDB because MariaDB was a point-in-time fork on 5.5.

samlambert 3y ago

I see the “Postgres is technology superior” take on hn all the time. Can you actually back that up? Can you explain why the dozens or so Postgres scale up solutions don’t use real Postgres? Or why anyone at scale with Postgres migrates away? https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ This outage would have been a lot less likely with MySQL because of redo logs which MySQL has had for a decade. But Postgres replication is under developed. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-datab... Facebook has evaluated every database on the planet and still uses MySQL. https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/core-infra/mysql/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/core-infra/mysql/ When MySQL has more users, can scale significantly more, runs some of the largest sites on earth, and even lends its storage engine to other databases like Dynamo you should backup your claims that Postgres is technically superior. Please.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Yes, Postgres is a toy database that can't do replication correctly. You are not wrong.
- keep_reading 3y ago
  Postgres replication features have lagged behind but were never dangerous. MySQL has multiple edge cases where things on the master will not happen on the slave depending on which replication method you've selected and which features you're using. MySQL is the issue here.
bbatha 3y ago
Postgres still has a ways to go for scale but has improved substantially in replication options since that 2017 article. Sharding has also seen a lot of upstream patches from enterprise db and other commercial providers since then. Upgrades in particular are still a sore spot. Also note that folks aren’t running giant vanilla MySQL clusters. They’re running it through vitess or home grown tools with similar functionality. Finally MySQL gets performance in these large setups by turning off features like foreign keys, acid guarantees etc. it’s awesome and powerful that you can do this in MySQL but it’s not apples to apples here. MySQL has also improved a lot on these dimensions in the last few years. The other reality here is that on nvme hardware with a few tb of ram you can get away with a basic reader writer replica setup for a long time.
- samlambert 3y ago
  Vanilla MySQL vs vanilla Postgres. MySQL still wins on scale. You run single MySQL servers with 70,000 connections, you can't get close on Postgres because of a fundamentally broken connection-per-process model. The Neon team suggested changing that and got flamed by the community. I was at GitHub in 2017 when that GitLab outage happened. We had 60 million users running on vanilla MySQL no Vitess at that point. We had 10 million users literally running on 3 MySQL servers. Don't pretend that even now Postgres can do that.
  - 3y ago

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> ... it was always technologically superior to MySQL No, it wasn't, and still isn't. MySQL supports replication correctly and out of the box, Postgres still hasn't figured this out. (Replication is the #1 important feature for any setup that is larger than one server.)

junon 3y ago
> Replication is the #1 important feature for any setup that is larger than one server That's... just replication. And postgres handles replication fine in my experience, I could in fact say the opposite about MySQL. What issues do you have with it?
- samlambert 3y ago
  Please do say the opposite about MySQL. Tell us what is wrong with it? Linkedin use MySQL replication to ship data across regions and rebuild caches the other side because other protocols are too unreliable. Postgres documents that their replication protocol can lose committed transactions. https://patroni.readthedocs.io/en/latest/replication_modes.html https://patroni.readthedocs.io/en/latest/replication_modes.h... Looking real good.
  - jvdongen 3y ago
    This is a disingenuous comment at best. As explained in the docs you link to, Postgres has both synchronous and asynchronous replication modes. In asynchronous mode availability is favored over durability. Which means commits can get lost when the primary goes down in an uncontrolled fashion. In sync mode that will not happen at a cost to some performance. It’s the same trade-off any distributed system has to make, and the user gets to make the choice.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      MySQL can actually do one better which is semisync. The transactions get replicated synchronously but applying them is async. You can't lose data anymore due to a primary failure.

optymizer 3y ago

10-15 years ago, the MySQL cli has was far more user friendly than PostgreSQL. I don't remember the specifics, but I found postgres pedantic and lacking shortcuts that made life easier. That said I liked PHP too.

nickstinemates 3y ago

There's hundreds of thousands of small companies out there that run a mariadb database that needs support. That's who mariadb sells to. Consequently, they have a lot of very small customers all over the world.

tpetry 3y ago
But MariaDB is not selling to them. They are now only selling their enterprise version of MariaDB with ”Contact Us“ pricing. So those hundreds of thousands companies will not be a paying customer.
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  MariaDB is selling to them via a subscription license, not through SkySQL / their cloud offering and has been for a long time.

treprinum 3y ago

Sun Microsystems paid some billion to MySQL authors that then decided to have more fun with MariaDB and started to compete with Sun/later Oracle again. Not sure where did the billion go if MariaDB is now in need to raise debt...