I am looking to upgrade from MYSQL 5.5 to MYSQL 5.6, but was considering going to MariaDB(10.0). My current connection is MySQL i assume that I will have no issues with the app switching to another db. Is that true?
•All MySQL binaries (mysqld, myisamchk etc.) give a warning if one uses a prefix of an option (such as --big-table instead of --big-tables). MariaDB binaries work in the same way as most other Unix commands and don't give warnings when using unique prefixes.
•MariaDB GTID is not compatible with MySQL 5.6. This means that one can't have MySQL 5.6 as a slave for MariaDB 10.0. However MariaDB 10.0 can be a slave of MySQL 5.6 or any earlier MySQL/MariaDB version.
•To make CREATE TABLE ... SELECT work the same way in statement based and row based replication it's by default executed as CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE on the slave. One benefit of this is that if the slave dies in the middle of CREATE ... SELECT it will be able to continue. ◦One can use the slave-ddl-exec-mode variable to specify how CREATE TABLE and DROP TABLE is replicated. •See also a detailed breakdown of System variable differences between MariaDB 10.0 and MySQL 5.6.
•MySQL 5.6 has performance schema enabled by default. For performance reasons MariaDB 10.0 has it disabled by default. You can enable it by starting mysqld with the option --performance-schema.
unquote excerpt Generally, when going through the COMMENTS under that page, the first two in particular in regard to updates, it seems as if one needs to be very well aware of the old wisdom: NEVER TOUCH A RUNNING SYSTEM.
