The story sounded plausible. Red Hat was said to have announced that the next version of its flagship operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 would ship with the MariaDB database management system (DBMS) installed by default, instead of Oracle’s MySQL. Too bad the story was wrong.

Mark Coggin, senior director of product marketing for RHEL, told me that “RHEL provides customers choice by shipping with several databases supported on a 10-year life-cycle. We plan to do the same with RHEL 7 when it ships; however we are not confirming specific features such as the databases, at this time.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 software stack still under wraps. More >