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Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/oracle-begins-cutting-thousands-jobs-cnbc-reports-2026-03-31/
The layoffs reportedly amount to about 30,000 staff.
Oracle are stewards (I’m being super polite here…) of MySQL, currently our only officially-supported database engine for Textpattern CMS.
Is it time for us to consider formally supporting recent-ish MariaDB LTS releases? The work & time involved will be presumably far lower than the PDO-related plans (v5?).
We’ve got other engines like Percona, but they’re less of a concern since they tend to track and match MySQL changes. MariaDB on the other hand…they’re a bit more freeform.
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
Absolutely. MariaDB is broadly compatible (unix_timestamp(0) notwithstanding, but Oleg worked around that) so the official stamp of compatibility should be fairly easy to obtain.
PDO itself isn’t going to help us much because of the amount of MySQLisms we use. It’ll be quite a bit of upheaval, which is why I’ve been putting it off.
I presume one of the demo server instances can be tweaked to run MariaDB instead of Percona fairly easily? That would give us a visible testbed playground. I’ve been running 10.11.14-MariaDB on live sites for ages and not noticed any ill effects.
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
Bloke wrote #343066:
Absolutely. MariaDB is broadly compatible (
unix_timestamp(0)notwithstanding, but Oleg worked around that) so the official stamp of compatibility should be fairly easy to obtain.
Great! I was hoping that was straightforward.
I presume one of the demo server instances can be tweaked to run MariaDB instead of Percona fairly easily? That would give us a visible testbed playground. I’ve been running 10.11.14-MariaDB on live sites for ages and not noticed any ill effects.
Yes. The next rebuild phase (early summer this year, I’m going through the application process for DigitalOcean open source credit renewal now – fingers crossed). From a sysadmin point of view, it’s trivial to have either MySQL (Oracle / Percona) or MariaDB on a VPS if you’re using a package installer…having both or all three gets more tricky as they need their own filesystem hierarchy, different ports, resources assigned etc.
Compiling MySQL or MariaDB from source takes hours, whereas a package installer might take a minute or so…so the packaged option is more sensible with current resources. There are plans for a dev-only server with multiple versions of both, with gobs of RAM etc, but I need to figure out each vendor / product’s architecture and resource requirements first.
But to answer your question: yes, MariaDB doable on future demo server build.
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
Woot, thank you.
Pretty sure we have a whole bunch of people running MariaDB successfully on 4.9.x and earleir, so it should be a fairly simple process to sit and play round with Txp for half hour or so and stress test it.
Note to self: Unit Tests. Unit Tests. Unit Tests…
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Hire Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
Back when my Opalstack server was using MariaDB (~8months ago), I used TXP 4.9-dev quite a lot without noticing anything different, strange, messy, buggy, wrong… That was a MySQL 8.4LTS equivalent version (MariaDB 10.6 ??). Of course I understand Textpattern is rather conservative in its sql handling (bwc with MySQL 5.7 etc). And of course, more recent version of MariaDB are going on more divergent paths from MYSQL.
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
phiw13 wrote #343071:
Of course I understand Textpattern is rather conservative in its sql handling (bwc with MySQL 5.7 etc). And of course, more recent version of MariaDB are going on more divergent paths from MYSQL.
Heavy +1.
This is also a good opportunity for us to consider sensible minimums for MariaDB support since we don’t have the baggage of a 20-year MySQL history to bring with us.
There’s a convenient graph + table for MariaDB vendor support here for background info.
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
With most releases having a 3-month support window, I can’t see us taking them up on the offer, given our release cycles!
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Hire Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Layoffs at Oracle; should we work on making MariaDB support official?
Bloke wrote #343073:
With most releases having a 3-month support window, I can’t see us taking them up on the offer, given our release cycles!
This is pretty much the same cadence and support window as MySQL for non-LTS versions – see endoflife.date/mysql – but the MySQL LTS support windows have been longer than the MariaDB LTS support windows. I don’t recall any hosting org I’ve used in the past offering non-LTS releases of MySQL, so I don’t think it’s a widespread thing.
From a testing point of view, the non-LTS releases are a useful insight, but the LTS releases tend to hang around so much longer than their official vendor support. There’s more of an appetite for new PHP because it typically brings more obvious improvements & changes, whereas a database sorta sits there and needs to be boringly safe.
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