netphotographics.org

WHM is telling me I need to upgrade from MySql 5.6 and it recommends MariaDB 10.3. I haven't heard about MariaDB before, although it's apparently been around for quite awhile.

The thing that surprised me is that WHM recommended MariaDB 10.3 over MySql.

I will do as you suggest, Stephen, and upgrade to MySql 5.7 rather than changing to MariaDB. My websites are working fine: why fix what's not broken? If MySql has a long future then that seems wise for now.

Thank you.
Cyndy

I did some research on MariaDB. MariaDB was created as a fork of MySQL about the time Oracle took over MySQL (much as netPhotoGraphics was a fork of zenphoto.) As best as I can tell the current version of MariaDB is equivalent to MySQL version 5.7. That would mean that the PHP support for MySQL would work equally well with MariaDB, thus only the server would know that the database is MariaDB rather than MySQL.

Since netPhotoGraphics uses the get_server_info() database method I presume it will even report that it is running MiriaDB. Of course the choices it offers for a database connector (typically MySQLi) reflect the PHP API, not the actual underlying database.

I do wonder why your provider offers both databases. But maybe they are trying to get out from under Oracle and move to MariaDB for fear that someday Oracle will want to charge them for using MySQL.

I will continue to use MySQL since that is what WAMP, my local testing environment, and my Host Provider both supply. Locally I use MySQL 5.7.24 and on the host server it is 5.6.41. There may be optimizations that would be database software specific but I doubt that would matter to netPhotoGraphics. I doubt that any of the query syntax we use would ever be an issue either, it is pretty basic stuff.

Thank you for your comments. I really appreciate it.