> Oh well, better in their hands than Oracle's. One might think that but it has surprisingly not been true. Oracle, already the owner of InnoDB, now owning th

> Oh well, better in their hands than Oracle's. One might think that but it has surprisingly not been true. Oracle, already the owner of InnoDB, now owning the entirety of mysql has been able to stop fighting with Sun and push out awesome features at a high rate. Just to name a few since Oracle took over: * Big performance improvements for multi-core. * Performance Schema * Full-text engine for InnoDB * Thread pools * Improved support for SSD * Online schema updates MariaDB forked at 5.5 and is going to be missing lots of really nice features. They can back port some of it but they aren't going to be able to keep up very well. They have their own implementation of some of these features which, given their small user base, I do not trust as much as the versions implemented in MySQL proper. Also given that MariaDB was forced to merge with SkySQL to survive I just don't see a bright future for MariaDB as long as Oracle continues to improve MySQL like it has been.