[RFC] Support for MariaDB

[Ger]

As per https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopi ... 63#p253363 support for MariaDB would be nice.

Proposal
MariaDB is forked in 2010 from MySQL when Sun sold that to Oracle. At this point it's pretty much the same as MySQL, therefore phpBB will probably work on MariaDB (I can't test this on my though since I have no MariaDB).
However: I guess that MariaDB will probably gradually move away from MySQL. Therefore real support for MariaDB would be nice for those who want to switch from Mysql to MariaDB.
Adaption should be easy now:

From the sounds of that article, MariaDB should work fine and you can probably even use the phpBB MySQL driver as it is to connect to a MariaDB database without issues.

I guess that when MariaDB does move away from MySQL, there should be an extension to the mysql class or perhaps an own class.

Pros

• Support for wider range of DB drivers
• It's easier to adapt now than over a few years I guess

Cons

• More work for devs since they have to consider yet another DB driver when making changes

PS: this is not really in my intereset since I can't even use MariaDB, but since it was mentioned in above topic I thought I'd take the effort to make it an RFC.

[bantu]

I don't think discussing this makes much sense as long as
- MariaDB is still pretty much compatible with MySQL
- there is no explicit MariaDB support in PHP
- our MySQL DB driver works just fine with MariaDB

[Oleg]

Mariadb support simply needs testing.

[MichaelC]

Mariadb support simply needs testing.

+1

[Dragosvr92]

It sounds like mariadb was created by a very passionate religious person.

This text is their website headline; "MariaDB: An enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL."
They based their software on mysql and they want to kill/replace it ? Im not sure if its better than mysql as i dont know much about databases, but it doesnt seem to be used/known by many persons, so it can wait, till they move to whatever they move and then look better into it.
If you make it work for phpbb and in a few months they upgrade it, you lost the time to support it for nothing..

[EXreaction]

Its lead developer is Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL and Monty Program AB. He had previously sold his company, MySQL AB, to Sun Microsystems for 1 billion USD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB


From the looks of things, I do not think we will be required to do anything for MariaDB support. MariaDB is maintaining complete compatibility with MySQL, which is likely to be known by anyone who wants to use MariaDB, so they should know they can select MySQL as the backend and just enter the correct server address to access the database instead of MySQL.

If we wanted to, we could add it to the list of supported databases during the installation process and just make it use the mysql backend, but I don't know what the benefit is for us.

[bantu]

It would be nice to run tests using our MySQL driver on a MariaDB database. For Travis-CI see https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/1081

[Vinny]

Interesting: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12 ... migration/

[keith10456]

It sounds like mariadb was created by a very passionate religious person.

This text is their website headline; "MariaDB: An enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL."
They based their software on mysql and they want to kill/replace it ? Im not sure if its better than mysql as i dont know much about databases, but it doesnt seem to be used/known by many persons, so it can wait, till they move to whatever they move and then look better into it.
If you make it work for phpbb and in a few months they upgrade it, you lost the time to support it for nothing..

Mariadb was created because Oracle now owns MySQL. So if Oracle decides to make an about face on how it supports MySQL and/or its rights of usage, the open-source community will have an alternative. Currently, it's not as good as MySQL but more and more people are supporting and contributing to the project. It will get there soon enough... That being said, I really hope that phpBB adds support for mariadb considering the goal of mariadb and that phpBB is open-source

+1 for the RFC.

[EXreaction]

Since MariaDB is maintaining compatibility with MySQL, we should already support it/work perfectly on MariaDB without any changes required (just select MySQLi and connect to the MariaDB server).