There seems to be increasing interest in supporting MariaDB as an option for storing metastore metadata. Supporting it as a database option is also easy as it is compatible with mysql. I thought it would be useful to discuss supporting it in the dev list before creating any jiras.
There are two aspects I would like to discuss - 1. Changes in hive to support MariaDB The existing mysql schema creation/upgrade scripts in hive should just work for mariadb as well. However, MariaDB has some additional optimizations that we might want to use in future to optimize queries for it. That would mean creating specific scripts for mariadb. However, until we introduce such MariaDB specific tuning, I think it is better to avoid duplicating the mysql scripts. To make the transition to possibly using MariaDB optimized scripts easier, one option is to have schematool consider it as an alias for mysql until that happens. 2. Testing with MariaDB It would be useful to have tests for mariadb as well on the lines of what is available for mysql in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-9800, to ensure that mariadb support is not broken. Thanks, Thejas
