Episode: 1423
Title: HPR1423: Monty - The man behind your databases
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1423/hpr1423.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 02:05:52

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Listen to the man who created the database you use every day, today on Hacker Public Radio.
A couple of months ago, I attended FScon's 2013. There I met Mikael Montuvi Denius, the driving
force behind both MySQL and MariaDB. This is a guy who loves being a developer and he loves
open-source software. He named MySQL after his daughter Mi and the new fork MariaDB got its name
from his other daughter, Maria. Monti was invited to FScon's 2013 to give a speech entitled The MySQL
and MariaDB story and this synopsis on FScon's.org says,
the story of how MySQL was created, why it was successful and how it grew until it was so to
son who was then overtaken by Oracle. It will also cover how and why MariaDB was created and what
we are doing to ensure that there will always be a free version of MySQL under the name of MariaDB.
The talk will also explain the challenges we have had to do this fork, especially the merge
with MySQL 5.5 and the various systems like buildbot that we used to build the binaries
and how we are working with a MariaDB slash MySQL community. End quote.
This presentation can be found on YouTube and I encourage you all to have a look at that.
But let us now listen to the short version as I have a little chat with one of the creators
of MySQL. So my name is Mikael. With the news, everybody calls me Monti. I'm here to talk about MySQL,
the history and why we went from creating MySQL to creating MariaDB and why it's important that
MariaDB exists and our aim is to make MySQL obsolete as soon as possible because it's not the
open source anymore. That is the basic just of your problem with MySQL as of today that it isn't
open source. Yes, because it's no open core and there's no binding promises ever done by Oracle
that would even ensure in some context there will be a future of MySQL. And logically, I don't see
a reason why they would like MySQL to have a future because they lose so much money just because of
MySQL existence. Why did you create MySQL from the start? To solve my own problems. So I was working
as a first worker and then a consultant in different companies and I saw a need for database and
I created one and then I got some friends in Sweden who find customers for it and then we were
using that for actually big data back then and tracking people's behavior when it was shopping.
So I just optimized the database for years for my own use and my customers use but I always wanted
to do something good for the open source community because I was using a lot of open source tools.
So when the opportunity arrived, which was when I wrote a SQL on top of my old product,
and then I noticed, or me and David Aksmark, the other phone on MySQL noticed that, hey, this is
something that could be useful but for many, then we released it and we released it in such a way
that we could, that if it would be a success, we would get enough money to hire more people to
develop it. And that was kind of the original history. And what was this? So the release was in
1995 but I started the original project in 1981. And you have never tired of developing on
in SQL? You haven't got tired of being a developer and coding through all these years?
No, so even when my school started to get successful, I always had been in a developer role.
I was hiring people to do the management so I could spend at least half of my time doing
development and I'm still doing that. Wonderful. And now you are, what is your role in the MariaDB
foundation? So I'm the CTO there and the reason we created the MariaDB foundation was to ensure that
the one mistake we did with MySQL with not protecting the community development of it would never
happen with MariaDB. So while MariaDB, part of the trademark is now owned by SkySQL and all the
main core engineers on my SQL I work in SkySQL, we are the foundation who have the right to the
trademarks of the server to ensure that there will always be community participation in a development
on it so that we never have to do a fork again. But you never stopped working on mySQL. You went
with the project to Sun when you sold it, right? Yes, and I wanted to ensure that the Sun would take
care of both the project and the people who are part of the project. I also wanted to help Sun
to go to the next level of open source because Sun was a really good promotional entity of open
source but they never really understand how can they take to the next level, how can they do both
business and good things with open source. I wanted to help Sun doing that but unfortunately Sun
got bored before that was possible. Yeah and that was sad not just for MySQL but for other projects
they were doing as well. I mean most of the open source projects that was developed by Sun
like Open Solar is Libro office, Oracle has effectively killed all of them, at least in the
Oracle companies. Some of those has been able to survive outside or others has not.
You just had a major release of MariaDB, right? Yes, we released the TenCero Beta release
just on the 7th of November very recently and that's replication release. So for the first time
in the MySQL history the slave is as fast as the master for doing queries. And we also have a
totally new implementation of global transaction ID that makes it very easy to switch a slave to a
master. So we solve two of the biggest problems that exists in the MySQL replication environment.
And there are a lot of new as well? Yes, I mean we have lots of features. Some taken from MySQL 5.6
something that we implemented ourselves like multi source replication which is also replication
feature. So we basically if you're looking at the MySQL history and the MariaDB history what we
added in MariaDB we have much better replication, much more secure code, we've been much with
these cases for everything and we also have a much better optimizer so which makes MariaDB the
choice for advanced queries. And MariaDB is rapidly growing in user base and the Linux distributions
including it as the default option as I understand it. Where do you think it will be in five years?
Looking at how things are now have seen some estimates from reliable sources like the 4.5.1 group
who has said that by 2015 more than 50% of our users were running MariaDB instead of MySQL.
I hope that we'll go sooner because the way the MySQL development is going we who know the code
we are very unhappy about happening with MySQL and we just hope that people will choose a
more secure and more open source produced instead of MySQL.
And if I understood you correctly from your presentation most of the developers from the start of
MySQL are now involved in MariaDB. Actually it was from the beginning so when I left Oracle I left
with a group so almost all of the core engineers the one who were from the start who knows
most of the code and you can basically put them to do anything in the code because they know it
all of them moved to MariaDB and we were working on that since not for almost five years now.
So in practical points of view to replace MySQL with MariaDB it's like that everything is compatible.
You just uninstall MySQL with MariaDB you get something that is in most cases notable faster
and has much more features and without any drawbacks. While where we are today already with MariaDB
55 there's no reasons to use MySQL anymore MariaDB in practical point of view is always better.
And that's a main feature actually. Is it hard to get into the community if there is a core
group of developers who has been in the project for a long time? Is it hard for someone to come
from the outside and contribute? So one thing that we missed in MySQL was that because of the
sources and the disagreements we did management and they developed us. We didn't have an active
community group who were driving the community development in MySQL AB and I hope the
sun would fix it they didn't. So what we are done with MariaDB I made it very easy for people
from the outside to come and contribute code into MariaDB and that actually one of the
main thing that the foundation is doing. So if somebody has a patch they can request the foundation
to do a review, we will review the code immediately we will help them getting into MariaDB and that
also have given us a lot of code from the community into MariaDB. MariaDB 52 was basically features
that come almost exclusively from the community. No we have people at the Alibaba group in China
we have Google who are doing work on MariaDB. So we are kind of spreading things and that makes
the product more viable over the future. And if we wrap this up what would you like to plug?
So the main problem we have had with MariaDB actually with MySQL all over time is that we don't
know which feature we are developing that people are using. So with MariaDB we created a feedback plugin
that is totally anonymously sending a show status once a week to serve on our site and anybody can
go and see all these statistics. If people just couldn't enable that one that will help us a lot
because then we can see who is using the storage engine, who is using the GIS features and so on.
So we know where should we put in the sources. That would be really really helpful. And of course
coming into the project and helping us translate the manual. We have people working in the manual
but our people that are employed are mostly doing English. So translation would be important.
And of course if people using MySQL or MariaDB in a really critical production environment
coming and helping MariaDB Foundation to be able to with donations to be able to hire more people
working MariaDB would we also be represented. Wonderful talking to you. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
There you have it. So if you have not made the switch to MariaDB yet now is the time.
And Monty asks everyone who uses MariaDB to activate the anonymous plugin so that the developers
might know what to focus their attention on. If you cannot help with money or developing skills
we are all dependent on databases. And it's a good thing for us that Monty is out there doing
what's right. If you wish to look Monty in the eyes you have the opportunity to do so.
As this interview was recorded and will be released on YouTube or similar.
Follow all in IT radio on Google Plus, Twitter or Identica for updates on when that will be released.
There's a CT signing off.
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