Sometimes when you are busy trying to keep things glued together, one might loose sight of what technologies could make your situation better.  We often hear of great things, but shy away from having to learn a new system or piece of software since there is already enough in front of you to get a grip with.

So with all this free time, it is no surprise to me that my jaw dropped as I went through some of my bookmarks highlighting MariaDB, XtraDB and Galera.  For those that are not familiar with MariaDB I’ll sum it up with this:

MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version
http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-versus-mysql/

But there is more…

I was extremely excited to read some of the Speed Improvements of MariaDB over MySQL.  The largest headache I have had to deal with in many production environments is the poor optimization of a queries involving sub queries.  Certain queries are considered a dependent (correlated) sub-query where the optimizer may not choose the best path.  A great write up about this is over at Xarpb – How to optimize subqueries and joins in MySQL.

Now what does this have to do with MariaDB?  That article was written in 2006 and it is still an issue in MySQL 5.5.15.  Subqueries are actually usable in MariaDB!  Some other features that oust MySQL are to name a few:

– Faster and safer replication: Group commit for the binary log. This makes many setups that uses replication and lot’s of updates more than 2x times faster.
– CHECKSUM TABLE is faster.
Pool of Threads in MariaDB 5.1 and even better in MariaDB 5.5. This allows you to run – — MariaDB with 200,000+ connections and with a notable speed improvement when using many connections.
From “MariaDB versus MySQL Features“

I can’t wait to get my VPS setup and get MariaDB running.  Time to read up on Galera!

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