Is anyone running an Open edX Platform site with MariaDB as the database? If so, what made you prefer that to MySQL?
The main reason I’m interested is because I’d like to specify collation for certain database fields in a new app, but the set of supported collations are different between MariaDB and MySQL. I’m trying to figure out how careful I need to be about that, esp. given that they use the same driver from the Django point of view.
At MIT Open Learning we have been running Open edX with MariaDB via AWS RDS for a number of years now. It has largely been without issue, the only problem being that older tables had a Latin1 encoding/collation by default so we had to manually alter all tables to be UTF8 encoding/collation during recent upgrades.
The encoding that we use is utf8mb4 with collation utf8mb4_unicode_ci and that has been fine for us.
@blarghmatey: That’s really helpful to know, thank you!
Do you remember how long it took to do the alter table operations to convert your tables? Did you have to take significant downtime to do so?
The overall process took on the order of ~30 minutes total. I already had planned downtime during a version upgrade so it didn’t impact the day-to-day operations. This is for a DB with tables containing millions of records in the history tables.