Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-December/064994.html

by neya • 14 years ago

139 36 14 years ago

lists.wikimedia.org

JackWebbHeller• 14 years ago

Which database system Wikipedia is currently using?

AdamGibbins• 14 years ago

MySQL

tommorris3• 14 years ago

Well, MySQL plus a text store.

MediaWiki, the open source software that Wikipedia uses, now officially supports MariaDB.

plasma• 14 years ago

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL by Monty (original MySQL author)

jamespitts• 14 years ago

Hopefully this will get more people to adopt mariadb and be free of the legal and upgrade uncertainties of mysql. I installed it a few weeks ago and the result is -exactly- like mysql.

http://blog.mariadb.org/mariadb-foundation-to-safeguard-lead...

sonier• 14 years ago

How does MariaDB compare to Percona?

mjallday• 14 years ago

It's a drop in replacement for MySQL, you can use the _storage engines_ that Percona provide such as ExtraDB so maybe it shouldn't differ at all?

revscat• 14 years ago

Wikipedia seems like the perfect system for a document store like CouchDB. I would be curious to know if they examined it and, if so, found it lacking.

stingraycharles• 14 years ago

My guess is that they have been using MySQL for a long, long time (possibly since the beginning)m, and see no need to migrate to something different. MariaDB is API-compatible with MySQL, so this migration will not involve much changes at the client side; it's mostly thorough testing that needs to be done.

notatoad• 14 years ago

MariaDB is a (almost) drop-in replacement for MySQL, CouchDB is a totally different concept that would require nearly a complete re-write of their backend. I doubt they considered it.

neilk3• 14 years ago

MediaWiki uses a fairly typical mostly-normalized relational design. You couldn't easily port it to a document store.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/MediaWiki...

Also, most MediaWiki installs use plugins, and those plugins often create their own database tables. So RDBMS is pretty much baked into the MediaWiki culture.

However, MediaWiki is fairly well abstracted from any particular RDBMS implementation. Everything from creating tables to making a join is done through an API.

tommorris3• 14 years ago

So, there's some legacy here. 10 years ago, there wasn't anything really like CouchDB.

nikcub• 14 years ago

Document DB's aren't an invention of the past 10 years. SAS was invented in the 60's, Lotus Notes in the 80's. XML Databases were all the rage during the dotcom bubble.

The difference today is that open source projects have made document stores and 'nosql' technologies more accessible.

minimax• 14 years ago

Several months ago I noticed Wikipedia's Ganglia (cluster performance monitoring software) is publicly accessible. Check out db59 (mentioned in the note) amongst the other servers:

http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=hour&cs=&ce=&...

If you want to see a bunch of other cool public Ganglia instances you can do a search something like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22show+only+nodes+matching%...

zanny• 14 years ago

Any reason why the load on db59 is so high? Are they trying to stress test it?

JaggedJax• 14 years ago

I couldn't say the reason, but the I/O for db59 [http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph_all_periods.php?h=...] is much higher than the other servers as well.

Also, despite the switch on db59 happening a few days ago, there doesn't seem to be a significant change in overall CPU usage: http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=month&z=...

FiloSottile• 14 years ago

    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.

ck2• 14 years ago

Note that unless your mysql server has more than 4 (physical) cores, you aren't going to see any performance improvements from any variation/fork of mysql. 8 cores is where things start to diverge under load.

This website has some benchmarks to prove it: http://vbtechsupport.com/606/ http://vbtechsupport.com/657/2/

Also http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4...

But there are other reasons to look at mariadb/percona.

malinens2• 14 years ago

What about MariaDB5.5 and MariaDB10.0 performance compared to 5.3?

saosebastiao• 14 years ago

Why do they care about whether the technology is derived from MySQL or not? Postgres makes way more sense for pretty much every application out there now. What am I missing?

rubinelli• 14 years ago

They aren't starting from scratch. Migrating your database is a complex and risky project, and not the kind of thing you do unless you have a very clear, very pressing reason, like horrible performance and stability issues, or saving tens of millions of dollars in licenses. Migrating to MariaDB is more like upgrading a minor version, with minimal risk and zero downtime. And they have a lot of experience in MySQL, almost all of it transferable to MariaDB.

yuvadam• 14 years ago

TIL MariaDB is to MySQL what Jenkins is to Hudson.

altcognito2• 14 years ago

How long until there is something similar for Java? Let's play name the products that need to be saved from Oracle.

tesmar2• 14 years ago

open jdk?

jzelinskie• 14 years ago

Arguably the other JVM-hosted languages are exactly this.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

How about 'elCaro' ?

damncabbage• 14 years ago

In case anyone else was wondering about InnoDB like I was:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MariaDB/Storage_Engines

MariaDB has XtraDB, which is a drop-in replacement for InnoDB; I'm not sure if it's encumbered or not, given it's Percona's fork of InnoDB.

(Does anyone have any experience using XtraDB that they can relate?)

RenierZA• 14 years ago

Which storage engine is Wikipedia using (MyISAM, XtraDB or Aria)?

Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB

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