Randal Schwartz posted on Twitter about switching away from MySQL to Drizzle or MariaDB. And said:

no reason to be using “Oracle” MySQL at this point.

I wish it were that easy.

While I would love to support the totally open-sourced technologies, the idea of “just switching” is akin to saying “just convert your 80 gigs of mp3 to flac”.  It’s impractical.

1) MySQL is everywhere.  On my Windows machine, I run a local server using WAMP… and haven’t found a WADP alternative.  Since I’m poor, I’m not able to have a dedicated server for my personal websites, and thus have to use a shared host.  On said host, they only have MySQL databases.

2) MySQL is well-known. There has not yet been a time when I had a MySQL question that wasn’t quickly answered with Google search.  While their official documentation is pitiful and mostly unusable (seriously, get a clue from PHP’s great manual) , the wealth of info on other sites like StackExchange or Daniweb is astounding. I haven’t found anything matching that with other DBs… except maybe MSSQL.

3)MySQL is easy. Similar to #1, I can have a full web PHP stack running on my Windows machine in minutes, thanks to WAMP or XAMPP.  On my shared host, it takes about 5 form fields to get one set up.  Until other options become that easy, or I dedicate my life to Linux, MySQL is just a huge timesaver.

4) WordPress. I love WordPress, and it can do almost anything I want. Over the past year or so, I’ve been studying all I can about WordPress and want to become an expert.  There have been some experiments with using different DBs with it, but honestly, WordPress and MySQL are essentially joined at the hip. Again, until that changes or another DB is easy to drop in, I’ll be sticking with MySQL.