---
title: "Narayan Newton on the Future of MySQL Forks and Patches"
url: "/podcasts/drupal-voices/narayan-newton-on-the-future-of-mysql-forks-and-patches"
type: episode
date: 2010-07-26
updated: 2014-04-09
---

# Narayan Newton on the Future of MySQL Forks and Patches

#  Narayan Newton on the Future of MySQL Forks and Patches 

  

*Podcast episode player*

[Narayan Newton](https://www.tag1.com/) (aka [nnewton](http://drupal.org/user/94675)) talks about the future of MySQL and it's various forks and different patch sets that are emerging. He's the lead sysadmin for [drupal.org](http://drupal.org), a database optimization expert with [Tag1 Consulting](https://www.tag1.com/), and the co-maintainer of [Pressflow](https://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-63-david-strauss-performance-scalability-and-pressflow-drupal-distribution), which is the high-performance Drupal distribution.

Since Sun bought MySQL and then Oracle bought Sun, a lot of the MySQL developers have left to [Monty Program Ab](http://askmonty.org/wiki/Main_Page) and there are more decisions that need to be made by database administrators.

There is an active [issue on Drupal.org that discusses the various forks](http://drupal.org/node/861192), and whether Drupal should recommend a particular flavor of MySQL, and [Newton summarizes](http://drupal.org/node/861192#comment-3236272) the current MySQL landscape as having the following different options:

- MySQL/ORACLE
- MySQL/MariaDB (Monty + a lot of the original mysql devs are here)
- MySQL/Percona (Are partners of MariaDB and say they are going to switch to distributing it)
- MySQL/Ourdelta (Are already just redistributing MariaDB)
- MySQL/Drizzle (Not production ready)

Since the recording of this interview, it appears as though Percona and others are converging around [MariaDB](http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB) as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Newton also mentions [Oracle's MySQL 5.5,](https://dev.mysql.com/) a [set of patches from Percona,](https://docs.percona.com/) [Percona's XtraDB,](https://docs.percona.com/) the [Open Database Alliance](http://odba.org/) (which [includes](http://odba.org/profiles/) Monty Program and Percona), the [InnoDB Plugin](http://www.innodb.com/products/innodb_plugin/download/) as well as [Google patch set for MySQL](https://github.com/google/mysql-tools) and [Facebook patch set for MySQL.](https://launchpad.net/mysqlatfacebook) Other notable MySQL fork products include [Drizzle](https://launchpad.net/drizzle) and [OurDelta](https://www.ourdelta.org/).

Here's a couple of useful graphics to help visualize the MySQL landscape:

- [Graphic of MySQL forks as of March 2010](http://openlife.cc/blogs/2010/march/map-mysql-forks-and-branches)
- [Graphic of MySQL forks as of August 2009](https://mtocker.livejournal.com/50931.html)

Newton also talks about benchmarking, the [grinder load test framework](http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/performance-testing-economist-online-using-grinder), and the limitations of using micro-benchmarks apart from testing on actual web sites. He also talks about how Drupal 7 gives the ability to run multiple backends including a combination of MySQL and [memcache](http://drupal.org/project/memcache) and [MongoDB](https://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-136-karoly-negyesi-on-mongodb-and-nosql-databases) and even scaling writes with [Cassandra.](https://cassandra.apache.org/_/index.html)

For more information, be sure to check out Newton's DrupalCon talk entitled [The Future Of MySQL: Forks, Patches And Decisions](http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/future-mysql-forks-patches-and-decisions)