Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Unless you need commercial support from Oracle, I just don't see a reason to run MySQL over MariaDB these days.

MariaDB has been a drop-in turn-key replacement for us in every case... the MySQL drivers even work with MariaDB as the backend.

Nearly everything (perhaps everything) MySQL does, MariaDB has or has had long before MySQL got around to it. Nearly all (perhaps all) commands work exactly the same, which means any support doc or query you might want to run can operate on both without issue. You can even get commercial support for MariaDB from several companies including the very organization that makes it.

Not to mention, most of the original MySQL team works on MariaDB.

So, other than the folks that don't know or don't care about the history... why would someone go out of their way to choose MySQL these days? Is this the "OpenOffice" effect perhaps?

View on HN

I noticed recently that MySQL has a JSON type that stores as structured binary data, while in MariaDB it's just an alias to MEDIUMTEXT and they provide some functions to operate on it as JSON.

Very interesting, I was not aware one could (or even would want to) store JSON data in a relational database...

    The JSON alias was added in MariaDB 10.2.7. This was done to make
    it possible to use JSON columns in statement based replication
    from MySQL to MariaDB and to make it possible for MariaDB to read
    mysqldumps from MySQL.

    JSON is an alias for LONGTEXT introduced for compatibility
    reasons with MySQL's JSON data type. MariaDB implements this
    as a LONGTEXT rather, as the JSON data type contradicts the 
    SQL standard, and MariaDB's benchmarks indicate that performance
    is at least equivalent.

    In order to ensure that a valid json document is inserted, the
    JSON_VALID function can be used as a CHECK constraint. This
    constraint is automatically included for types using the JSON
    alias from MariaDB 10.4.3.[1]

[1] https://mariadb.com/kb/en/json-data-type/

I use it to store metadata I don’t need to query for the most part.

Saves a lot of time data modeling and managing schemas for that kind of non critical data.

> I was not aware one could (or even would want to) store JSON data in a relational database...

Perhaps it's to borrow some elements from data stores like MongoDB, but whilst keeping most of the system based on the typical table/relation principles.

I've actually seen JSON used in PostgreSQL and admittedly I found the approach to be pretty horrible in most cases, performance/functions/syntax regarding the datatype aside.

Yet, I can't say that there aren't valid use cases for something like that, even if generally I'd advise against storing data that you actually want to query in a relational DB inside of JSON. Perhaps that's just because I believe that it'd increase complexity unnecessarily in most cases.

I lean on this quite often.

I find it really useful to utilize normal relational db things for 98% of your table and then have a column or two where you can store json objects and run queries for deep nested values equals x and things like json contains such and such value, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com