MariaDB and MaxScale, a perfect recipe for high-performance databases

What does the term "drop in replacement for Mysql" mean? In practice it means that I can replace a server installed with Mysql with one installed with MariaDB and my applications or cms, such as joomla! and wordpress, will continue to work correctly without any problem and without any incompatibility, nice right?

But that's not all, in fact MariaDB has many features and performance improvements compared to MySQL, which make it by far the perfect database manager for all CMS and for all applications that currently use MySQL.

For example, RedHat, the most well-known American company that deals with the development and support of open source software in an enterprise environment, replaced Mysql with MariaDB in the famous Linux distribution RHEL 7 in 2014, consequently CentOS also did so (often used as the preferred distribution for web servers all over the world), its version being only a rebuild of the RHEL sources.

Another very important company in the Linux world such as SUSE LLC has established important partnerships with MariaDB Corporation and included MariaDB as the default database manager in the openSUSE distribution (starting from version 12.3).

MariaDB and JoomlaHost.it In Colt Engine srl, the company that manages the Joomlahost.it brand, we are always looking for innovative but at the same time safe solutions, in fact we want to adopt new technologies (both hardware and software) only when we are certain that both the performance and the reliability provided to our customers are not affected, MariaDB is fully reflected in this philosophy.

Better search optimizations, improvements to existing storage engines and new features for developers are just some of the features that pushed us as an internet service provider to choose MariaDB as the database manager for our hosting services and therefore for our customers.

From the first tests the results were truly amazing and after a trial period of about a year, we decided to officially adopt MariaDB as database server manager for the new activations of our hosting and we are preparing a migration plan for customers already hosted on the Mysql platform.

If you would like to learn more about MariaDB, here are some links (in English) that explain in detail what MariaDB is and how to upgrade from mysql to MariaDB (article for system engineers).

Official MaxScale testers We at JoomlaHost.it have been committed for years to maintaining 100% guaranteed compatibility for all existing versions of Joomla that are hosted on our servers, it is a very difficult job if you think that the evolution of software, such as Mysql for example, goes ahead without looking anyone in the face. So how can you have guaranteed compatibility with old versions of Mysql, required by some plugins of Joomla! versions? older, without undermining safety and performance?

We asked the same question to some MariaDB developers and we were asked if we were interested in participating in the testing of their product under development called MaxScale.

What is MaxScale? MaxScale was born with a proxy concept at its core, but with a "database centric" philosophy and approach and an extremely configurable plugin architecture.

To better understand what it can do, I list its main features such as:

Database availability control (monitoring)

analysis of the incoming query to understand whether to direct it to a specific type of server

and much more, as you can see Maxscale can not only be used with MariaDB but also with Mysql, again to underline its flexibility.

The project began with a study of how and what to do to satisfy the requirements necessary to have a correct test environment, then I, Andrea Sosso from my development team, Luisa Raviol and Massimiliano Pinto (one of the Italian developers of MaxScale), studied the best configuration that could help everyone better understand how to use MaxScale in our hardware and software infrastructure.

The ball then passed to us at Joomlahost for the practical implementation of the test case and to be able, excuse the pun, to test the test environment.

In the next article dedicated to MariaDB and MaxScale Andrea will explain better how and what we technically did to build our test environment