MariaDB and Joomla ?

We were looking at the possibilities of upgrading the version of MySQL we are using on out NAS system and were reminded of the existence of the MariaDB database as a possible alternative. Alternative because our NAS does not easily permit the upgrade of the MYSQL part of the system mainly because it is so tightly tied into the other features.

What is MariaDB one might ask. Well there is probably no better explanation that that upon the MariaDB web site.

“For all practical purposes, MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version (for example MySQL 5.1 -> MariaDB 5.1, MariaDB 5.2 & MariaDB 5.3 are compatible. MySQL 5.5 will be compatible with MariaDB 5.5). What this means is that:

Data and table definition files (.frm) files are binary compatible.
All client APIs, protocols and structs are identical.
All filenames, binaries, paths, ports, sockets, and etc... should be the same.
All MySQL connectors (PHP, Perl, Python, Java, .NET, MyODBC, Ruby, MySQL C connector etc) work unchanged with MariaDB.
- There are some installation issues with PHP5 that you should be aware of (a bug in how the old PHP5 client checks library compatibility).
The mysql-client package also works with MariaDB server.
The shared client library is binary compatible with MySQL's client library. “

This means that as far as Joomla is concerned we should be OK to go as far as compatibility is concerned. The next question is of course can we install it upon our NAS? This is not quite so clear cut, currently. Some NAS system such as Synology certainly support it. Unfortunately our QNAP system does not currently, although we are unsure whether this is something that might coming in the future or not.

One to watch and perhaps it might be worth running up a test system to check out MariaDB, which it is claimed, is faster than MySQL. Another thing to consider is whether our Web Host might support it, which is a further step.