As you may expect from open source world thingy, almost every Linux distribution has developed it’s own way to manage our favourite RDBMS service. Yet none is perfect, or even some of them seems to not work in real server scenario1.

In this post I’m trying to compare and point out most annoying aspects of initialization scripts that I had to face in production.

In ‘old days’ probably all Linux distributions used to start and stop services using so called init scripts usually written in Unix shell (sh or Bash). But situation is not so simple these days anymore.

Folks started to think about improving things, like making system initialization faster by parallelization of starting services. So Upstart was developed in …

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup …

You can now yum (RPM) or apt-get (DEB) MariaDB 5.1.39, courtesy of OurDelta and in close cooperation with Monty Program Ab. Simply follow the info on the CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu pages.

(note: give the mirrors some hours to sync up)

Quick overview

• See the Release Notes for relevant bugfixes.
• Drop-in replacement for stock MySQL 5.0 or 5.1 (If you’re coming from stock MySQL, see the MariaDB extras/differences overview). …

MySQL 5.0.87-d10 OurDelta builds are now available (32 and 64-bit):

• Debian: Etch (4), Lenny (5)
• Ubuntu: Hardy (8.04), Intrepid (8.10), Jaunty (9.04), Karmic (9.10)
• RHEL/CentOS: 4, 5
• Binary tarballs: generic Linux, built on Ubuntu Hardy

Apart from the 5.0.87 upstream fixes there were a few minor fixes in the build environment, and one updated Percona patch. The -sail builds now include the OQGRAPH engine. Source packages are with the respective distro repos, and there are …