FWIW, in addition to MariaDB, there is Percona Server as well, and they are also...

caseyf · on Aug 18, 2012

I highly recommend Percona Server. especially if you are using SSDs or a mix of SSDs and regular disks.

__Joker · on Aug 18, 2012

Can you elaborate ?

caseyf · on Aug 19, 2012

Percona Server has lots of improvements (some small things and others that are pretty essential for me) On the SSD front, the main ones are:

* You can put the innodb doublewrite buffer on your spinning disks - that's the best place for it since it's heavy sequential writes. See section 2.2.2 here http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2009/05/tables-on-ssd...

* The ability to tune various parts of innodb that were originally designed to perform well on regular disks - those with fast sequential access, slower random access, and no real wear considerations. See http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.1/scalability/in...

Here's a recent post from Percona showing MySQL vs Percona server on an Intel 320 SSD: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/23/percona-serve...

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MariaDB is pretty nice too. Their team has introduced some sorely needed query optimizations (http://kb.askmonty.org/en/what-is-mariadb-53/#subquery-optim...) and it does include Percona's XtraDB.

I haven't looked at MariaDB 5.5 to see how it compares to Percona Server 5.5. I put Percona Server into production last fall and MariaDB was still at 5.3 at the time.

heretohelp · on Aug 18, 2012

Percona has done a lot of work to enable MySQL to take advantage of SSDs, work that hasn't percolated into mainline or MariaDB.

latimer · on Aug 19, 2012

I've benchmarked all three and it seemed like the vast majority of the performance improvement on SSDs was due to the XtraDB engine which is included with MariaDB.

heretohelp · on Aug 19, 2012

coughs

http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/

latimer · on Aug 19, 2012

Yes you have to install it separately for MySQL but it's enabled by default in MariaDB so their work has in fact made it into MariaDB.