MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL codebase by founding developer Monty Widenius. Unlike MySQL which is now the property of Oracle Corporation (which is no bad thing if you like paying per seat and per cpu licence fees), MariaDB is true opensource and community led and should be to all intents and purposes 100% compatible with the same major version from MySQL.

Backup the datafiles in case you want to go back to mysql5.1:

See what packages you have installed:

Purge each of these packages from the system - being careful not to remove workbench (which I did first time round, sigh):

Add the ourdelta repository to your system and update your repo’s:

Then install mariadb and follow the onscreen instructions to set a root password:

Whilst its not a million miles away from mysql 5.1, a quick browse of the conf file at /etc/mysql/my.cnf has a few differences that we’ll investigate at a later date. For now we’ve made the following changes to support our work.

utf-8 - we support multiple languages in all our work so using utf-8 from the get go is useful. MariaDB defaults to latin-1, so uncomment the sections in the client and server sections:

The slow query log is useful for tuning performance - it logs all queries that take longer than ‘long_query_time’ to run. Its also negatively effects performance, so we tend to turn it off unless we need it. Its ok to leave the vars uncommented - for now although they probably use a tiny bit of memory at runtime.
‘log_slow_admin_statements’ is a new one on me, but according to the manual ‘Log slow administrative statements such as OPTIMIZE TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and ALTER TABLE to the slow query log.’ - which is quite unnecessary when we’re not tuning.

Binary logging is useful for replication and an online backup. Disable it in development, and beware of any performance impact in live.

Innodb is set as the default storage engine, but this isn’t your fathers InnoDB, it's a highly optimised version called XtraDB from the MySQL performance consultancy Percona. Huzzah! Among other things XtraDB a direct binary replacement for InnoDB and you ‘should’ be able to use the same datafiles as MySQL if using the same major version. Theoretically we could have left the datafiles in place as we were moving from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.1. Its called InnoDB in the conf file, and InnoDB commands will work for compatibility.

A sign that this is a performance oriented distubution is that ‘O_DIRECT' is set by default. This stops the OS caching the filesystem as well as the storage engine. ‘innodb_file_per_table’ is also enabled by default which does exactly what it says on the tin. No changes required here until you know your app needs them through experimentation and testing - if you know you’re going to host many databases in live then at the very least increasing ‘innodb_open_files’ will be needed - but as this is for a desktop development drupal 7 environment, we can leave it for the time being.

Once you’ve hacked away on the conf file, restart the server using the same commands you know and love:

Once this is done you can use the same mysql command line as ever. You’ll know you’re getting some MariaDB love if you see a prompt like this:

From here on in its just like being back in babies arms. Minus Larry Ellison breathing down your neck. Although i’d like to think he’s a nicer bedfellow than Steve Jobs, one can’t help but wonder at what point the rug will be pulled out from under MySQL.

So for Drupal 7, follow the install procedure and choose MariaDB on the install dialogue. Once i’ve had a play i’ll be sure to post some metrics and performance tweaks for a D7 install.