
Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB - neya
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-December/064994.html
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FiloSottile

        The main goal of migrating to MariaDB is not performance driven.  More so,
        I think it's in WMF's and the open source communities interest to coalesce
        around the MariaDB Foundation as the best route to ensuring a truly open
        and well supported future for mysql derived database technology.
        Performance gains along the way are icing on the cake.

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minimax
Several months ago I noticed Wikipedia's Ganglia (cluster performance
monitoring software) is publicly accessible. Check out db59 (mentioned in the
note) amongst the other servers:

[http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=hour&cs=&ce=&...](http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=hour&cs=&ce=&s=by+name&c=MySQL%2520pmtpa&tab=m&vn=)

If you want to see a bunch of other cool public Ganglia instances you can do a
search something like:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22show+only+nodes+matching%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22show+only+nodes+matching%22)

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zanny
Any reason why the load on db59 is so high? Are they trying to stress test it?

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JaggedJax
I couldn't say the reason, but the I/O for db59
[[http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph_all_periods.php?h=...](http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph_all_periods.php?h=db59.pmtpa.wmnet&m=cpu_report&r=hour&s=by%20name&hc=4&mc=2&st=1355622088&g=network_report&z=large&c=MySQL%20pmtpa)]
is much higher than the other servers as well.

Also, despite the switch on db59 happening a few days ago, there doesn't seem
to be a significant change in overall CPU usage:
[http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=month&z=...](http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=month&z=xlarge&h=db59.pmtpa.wmnet&m=cpu_report&s=by+name&mc=2&g=cpu_report&c=MySQL+pmtpa)

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jamespitts
Hopefully this will get more people to adopt mariadb and be free of the legal
and upgrade uncertainties of mysql. I installed it a few weeks ago and the
result is -exactly- like mysql.

[http://blog.mariadb.org/mariadb-foundation-to-safeguard-
lead...](http://blog.mariadb.org/mariadb-foundation-to-safeguard-leading-open-
source-database/)

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sonier
How does MariaDB compare to Percona?

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mjallday
It's a drop in replacement for MySQL, you can use the _storage engines_ that
Percona provide such as ExtraDB so maybe it shouldn't differ at all?

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yuvadam
TIL MariaDB is to MySQL what Jenkins is to Hudson.

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altcognito
How long until there is something similar for Java? Let's play name the
products that need to be saved from Oracle.

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jzelinskie
Arguably the other JVM-hosted languages are exactly this.

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sturadnidge
Agreed, but I think s/he meant 'JVM' rather than 'Java'.

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altcognito
I didn't. But I should have! Thank you. I so often forget those "little"
details.

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revscat
Wikipedia seems like the perfect system for a document store like CouchDB. I
would be curious to know if they examined it and, if so, found it lacking.

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tommorris
So, there's some legacy here. 10 years ago, there wasn't anything really like
CouchDB.

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nikcub
Document DB's aren't an invention of the past 10 years. SAS was invented in
the 60's, Lotus Notes in the 80's. XML Databases were all the rage during the
dotcom bubble.

The difference today is that open source projects have made document stores
and 'nosql' technologies more accessible.

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damncabbage
In case anyone else was wondering about InnoDB like I was:

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MariaDB/Storage_Engines>

MariaDB has XtraDB, which is a drop-in replacement for InnoDB; I'm not sure if
it's encumbered or not, given it's Percona's fork of InnoDB.

(Does anyone have any experience using XtraDB that they can relate?)

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RenierZA
Which storage engine is Wikipedia using (MyISAM, XtraDB or Aria)?

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ck2
Note that unless your mysql server has _more_ than 4 (physical) cores, you
aren't going to see any performance improvements from any variation/fork of
mysql. 8 cores is where things start to diverge under load.

This website has some benchmarks to prove it: <http://vbtechsupport.com/606/>
<http://vbtechsupport.com/657/2/>

Also
[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4-benchmarks/)

But there are other reasons to look at mariadb/percona.

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malinens
What about MariaDB5.5 and MariaDB10.0 performance compared to 5.3?

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saosebastiao
Why do they care about whether the technology is derived from MySQL or not?
Postgres makes way more sense for pretty much every application out there now.
What am I missing?

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rubinelli
They aren't starting from scratch. Migrating your database is a complex and
risky project, and not the kind of thing you do unless you have a very clear,
very pressing reason, like horrible performance and stability issues, or
saving tens of millions of dollars in licenses. Migrating to MariaDB is more
like upgrading a minor version, with minimal risk and zero downtime. And they
have a lot of experience in MySQL, almost all of it transferable to MariaDB.

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JackWebbHeller
Which database system Wikipedia is currently using?

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AdamGibbins
MySQL

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tommorris
Well, MySQL plus a text store.

MediaWiki, the open source software that Wikipedia uses, now officially
supports MariaDB.

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whalesalad
I use MariaDB on my Mac for most things that require MySQL. It's a drop in
replacement for most things. Is there a special edge case with media wiki they
had to solve or is it now just formally announced as being supported?

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tommorris
So, it's pretty much a drop-in replacement. But as with everything, time m ust
be spent testing and so on before rolling it out to production. I believe a
transition to MariaDB has been planned for a while now.

