Internet giant Google is migrating from Oracle's MySQL databases to MariaDB, the fork from MySQL established by its co-founder, Monty Widenius.
The news was broken by Jeremy Cole, a senior systems engineer at Google at the Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) conference in Stanford, California this week.
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According to reports from that event, Google is actively participating in the MariaDB initiative to get it up to speed for real-world work supporting Google's online services. "Were running primarily on [MySQL] 5.1, which is a little outdated, and so we're moving to MariaDB 10.0 at the moment," he reportedly said.
The article went on to claim that the migration work started at the beginning of the year, with the two companies collaborating to develop new features to aid the migration.
However, it is unclear which services are currently being migrated and how widespread the migration will be.
MySQL has proved a popular database for its fast web-serving capabilities and forms the backbone of Twitter, Facebook and Google, among other popular web companies.
MariaDB was founded by MySQL co-founder Widenius in 2009 after MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems, under the explicit understanding that it would never be sold on to Oracle. Instead, though, Oracle bought Sun outright in 2010. Widenius stepped up his activities in MariaDB in response.
"When we sold to Sun, there was an agreement they would never sell to Oracle... But that Sun would be sold to Oracle was something you'd never even see in your dreams," Widenius told Computing in May.
While Oracle hasn't neglected MySQL, as feared, it has frustrated many users with its preference for new features over stability. "I value stability and performance over fancy new features. Oracle doesn't always feel the same way," said Cole in his presentation.
Google itself has plenty of reason to shift from Oracle-owned MySQL after Oracle founder Larry Ellison targeted the company on behalf of his friend, Apple's Steve Jobs. Ellison believes that Google's Android operating system is derivative of Apple's iOS and, in any case, rips off Oracle's own Java development environment - another technology Oracle picked up when it bagged Sun.
That disagreement culminated in a court case last year in which Oracle accused Google of infringing Oracle's Java intellectual property by using a clone of the Java APIs in the Dalvik virtual machine, which runs Android apps.
The case, though, was comprehensively lost.
The MariaDB Foundation, a governance body for the database, was established in December 2012, taking a fork of the open source MySQL database as a basis to compete against Oracle and any attempts to let MySQL die. The idea of the foundation is to protect MariaDB against encroachment by any commercial software vendor.
