So you decided that Oracle doesn’t know its left foot from the back of his neck when it comes to open source (how’s that for a mixed metaphor), but you are not ready just yet to migrate over to PostgreSQL? Consider MariaDB. Coming from Monty Widenius, the original author of MySQL, it aims to be 100% MySQL compatible while also being truly open-source.
Give that it’s 100% MySQL compatible, you can update in-place (nevertheless it is recommended that do a backup of your data first). The steps are roughly adapted from here.
- Go to the MariaDB repository configuration
tool and
generate your .list file (wondering what’s up with the 5.5 vs 10.0
version? See this short
explanation). You
don’t know the exact Ubuntu version you’re running? Just use
lsb_release -a. - Save the generated file under
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/MariaDB.listas recommended and do ansudo aptitude update. You should see an output complaining about some public keys. - Do
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xCBCB082A1BB943DBto add those keys (replace the last number with the one you saw in the previous output). - Issue
sudo apt-cache policy mysql-commonand you should see mariadb as an upgrade option. - Finally do
sudo aptitude upgrade mysql-common libmysqlclient18and watch your MySQL database being transformed into a MariaDB one and all keeping chugging along just as usual!