For years, MySQL has been the dominant open-source database management system (DBMS). Recently, MariaDB, the MySQL fork created by MySQL’s founder, has been making in-roads and Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most popular Web site, is shifting over from MySQL to MariaDB.
Asher Feldman, Site Architect at Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the group behind Wikipedia wrote recently, that he had” migrated one of the main production English Wikipedia slaves, db59, to MariaDB 5.5.28.” I then asked him if Wikimedia planned to move all of Wikipedia to MariaDB. He replied, “We will indeed be migrating more of our production databases to MariaDB. I’m hoping to have one of our major projects (such as the English language Wikipedia) fully migrated in production by the end of the year. I don’t have a specific timeline yet, but if the assessment continues to be positive, we may fully migrate production in the first quarter of next year.”
Why is Wikipedia making this move? Feldman wrote, “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.”