MariaDB is Michael "Monty" Widenius' branch of the popular MySQL database after it was purchased by Sun and taken in a different direction.

I was browsing my RSS Reader the other day and noticed that the latest beta of MariaDB was released as noted on the MySQL Performance Blog and thought as a database user and developer I would give it a try.

Since it was Sunday and I wanted a challenge I decided to install it from source. I downloaded the latest source tarball (5.1.38 Beta) to my Debian 5.0 server and uncompressed it. The build instructions were fairly standard:

1) Install the Prerequisites: apt-get build-dep mysql-server

2) In the source directory I ran: BUILD/autogen.sh

3) Than ./configure --prefix=/opt (I use /opt since I did not want it to interfere with my existing MySQL installation)

4) make

5) make install

From there I created a data directory for the MariaDB using mkdir /opt/data and the mysql_install_db tool (/opt/bin/mysql_install_db --datadir=/opt/data --user=mysql)

I stopped my running MySQL server and launched MariaDB:

/opt/libexec/mysqld --no-defaults --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 --basedir=/opt --datadir=/opt/data --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/opt/share/mysql/english --skip-external-locking --skip-networking --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=16M --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 --myisam-recover=BACKUP --query_cache_limit=1M --query_cache_size=16M --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M --plugin_dir=/opt/lib/mysql/plugin --plugin-load=ha_innodb.so:ha_archive.so &

This defines all the appropriate paths so MariaDB does not bump into MySQL, as well as load the InnoDB and Archive plugins.

As per the warnings when I started MariaDB for the first time I upgraded the database using: /opt/bin/mysql_upgrade -u root -p

To test the install I used the MariaDB command line client and the with the default root account: /opt/bin/mysql -u root -p.

MariaDB supports the complete MySQL feature set plus some tweaks including the XtraDB, processlist and extended slow log patch set from Percona.

MariaDB has the potential to surpass MySQL since it's development and expansion is driven by community need rather than corporate desire. It touts itself as being more optimized and speedier than the MySQL default MyISAM via the Maria Storage Engine. I do hope it will lives up to it's claims as I will be following it every step of the way.