There’s a saying in certain circles about “being willing to eat your own dog food”. It’s a reference a company who produces products that the company doesn’t or the employees of the company don’t use. Some (hypothetical) examples would be: executives at GM driving around in Fords or Apple employees using Dell laptops.
At Monty Program we’ve been guilty of this. Up until a few days ago our main website, askmonty.org, was running the stock MySQL server from our chosen Linux distribution’s repositories. This was mainly done for system administration simplicity. However, MariaDB now has Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS packages available for download and we saw no reason to not eat our own dog food. Yes, we could have taken the time to create custom build of MariaDB just for our own use even before our first beta releases, but like the barber with the bad haircut and the cobbler’s children with no shoes we are too busy improving MariaDB to focus on geeking up our web server with custom builds. For our production servers we would rather use standard packages like nearly everyone else on the planet. Why? So that we can focus on doing what we do best: making MariaDB the best version of MySQL you’ll find anywhere.
So how did the upgrade go? Swimmingly. There were a couple glitches due to some historical weirdness on our web server, but once those minor issues were resolved the install of the beta MariaDB packages was trouble-free. It just worked. All of the MySQL databases on the server were in perfect working order after the upgrade with the exception of a single table in one of the databases which was easily fixed with a “REPAIR TABLE dbname.tablename;”.
Oh, and before you ask: I performed a full backup of all of our databases to an external drive prior to doing the upgrade. I trust MariaDB as much as anyone can, but power outages, lightning strikes, earthquakes, floods, and even meteors hit Finland at the exact wrong time every once in a while and it would be just my luck to have one of those happen during an upgrade.
In conclusion: Monty Program is now eating its own dog food, and it’s awesome. 🙂