5 Reasons That May Make You Dump MySQL

When it comes to database management systems, MySQL has ruled the roost for a long time. It is still ruling, but the popularity has definitely faded since it came under Oracle in 2009. Open source database MariaDB is often seen to be the chief competitor for MySQL and more and more developers are choosing this new DBMS over MySQL regularly.

1. MySQL isn’t mature enough: Since it didn’t start out as a relational database management system, older ones like PostgreSQL and even closed source Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are considered to be more feature rich.

2. While MySQL is an open source database, many say that it doesn’t feel like one anymore. Since coming under Oracle’s banner, MySQL has closed source and proprietary modules. MariaDB is an open source alternative for MySQL. All code in MariaDB is under the LPGL, GPL or BSD licenses. So, it doesn’t have any closed source modules. On the contrary, it still has those features, but in an open source module.

3. Performance wise, MySQL seems to be failing to competitors. It’s chief competitor, MariaDB has been seen to be ahead on benchmark results. In fact, the MariaDB blog has benchmark results showing that it is ahead of MySQL, even if only by a little bit. Also, PostgreSQL has also added features that make some developers opt for it instead of MySQL.

4. While an open source platform should be driven by the community, MySQL is owned by Oracle. As a result of this, many developers choose to use MariaDB as they aren’t sure of the future of My SQL and Oracle doesn’t provide a public roadmap, not does it take patches from the community. Being built on MySQL, MariaDB is also faster and more stable.

5. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux already ships with MariaDB. In addition, Fedora has also announced that it would be moving to MariaDB. On the other hand, popular Linux-based distro openSUSE has also made the same announcement in January 2013.

Further, the Wikimedia Foundation has also supported MariaDB, which is a huge boost for the comparatively new database management system.