So what does someone do who builds their houses right on top of the LAMP stack (M standing for MySQL)?

For most folks, especially if they build on shared hosting infrastructures, this just isn’t an issue. They depend upon their hosting providers, for whom it may or may not be an issue – but they won’t have to think about it. For those folks in a position to choose which database software to use, (for example, you use VPS systems like Amazon, Slicehost, Linode, etc.,) then I think there are two pretty good options:

• Go with MariaDB, which is basically a drop-in replacement for MySQL (and conveniently starts with an “M”.)
• Switch to PostgreSQL.

MariaDB is a branch of MySQL that came about because of the uncertainty relating to Oracle’s ownership of MySQL. From the website:

In most respects MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL: all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! Additionally, MariaDB has a lot of nice new featuresthat you can take advantage of.

The problem is that the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) don’t yet have MariaDB in their repositories, so it will be a while before MariaDB is an easy apt-get or yum away from installation (there are some independent repositories and builds.)

PostgreSQL is a different beast entirely. It’s been an also-ran in the open source database race, and I was, for many years, quite faithful to it. It’s a very solid database, and it was ACID compliant before MySQL was. It’s major weakness (and why the LAMP stack is called that and not the LAPP stack) was that it was a fair bit slower than MySQL. But  that weakness has long been taken care of, but the damage was already done.

Many open source web database systems can use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL at this point. But PostgreSQL doesn’t have the same large user base, and doesn’t have many of the same web-based and desktop tools that MySQL does. There are differences in the SQL commands and such, and the command-line interface looks different. There is also a big difference in how Auto-numbered fields get handled, but that’s not really an issue that folks who don’t dive into deep database and code need to deal with.

So which to go with? It probably makes sense to wait a bit, first for MariaDB to make it into mainstream repositories, etc., and also to see what the fate of MySQL is. And checking out PostgreSQL is always a good option, it’s a very good database system, and the likely flight from MySQL might do the project some good.

However, today’s news that Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems has some very important implications. Why? It has to do with the fact that many, many nonprofit websites and web applications are built using MySQL, the most popular open source database management system. Sun bought MySQL AB (the company behind MySQL) last year for $1 Billion dollars, and therefore, MySQL AB now becomes a part of Oracle, it’s primary competition.

There is some suspicion that there may be anti-trust challenges because of this, but if it goes through, it raises some huge questions about what happens to MySQL because of this. Of course, since MySQL is open source, there is no danger of MySQL going away, someone can always fork it. And, ultimately there is a great open source database alternative called PostgreSQL, but support for it is not universal. However, the future of ongoing support and development for MySQL is certainly in question. Most nonprofits don’t get any support from MySQL AB directly, but larger organizations that might have been getting some support might see changes down the road.

It’s something that those of us who depend on MySQL for our web development projects will be watching quite closely.