After reading some good opinions about MariaDB I wanted to give it a try. Upgrade looks quite straight forward but I found some issues a little tricky.
Installation
Add repo and key:
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list <<SRC
deb http://mirrors.supportex.net/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main
deb-src http://mirrors.supportex.net/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main
SRC
(find more repositories here )
Now install MariaDB:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server
It could be better to install mariadb-server-5.5 and mariadb-client-5.5 package instead, because of this error .
MariaDB repo pinning
Some time after installation I have problem with newer packages from Debian repositories that upgraded my MariaDB installation back to MySQL - it’s described here , so I used pinning to resolve that.
cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/mariadb.pref <<PIN
Package: *
Pin: origin mirrors.supportex.net
Pin-Priority: 1000
PIN
Results
Before migration to MariaDB, front page of my blog needs about 650 ms to generate. After switch, it was only about 550ms. So it’s about 15% - absolutely for free 😄