Ben Emson

Installing MariaDB using Homebrew

MariaDB is a binary compatible and improved version of MySQL. This means that MariaDB is just a drop in replacement for MySQL. Why would you use MariaDB over MySQL?

Well it's faster, and the speed in which the team fixes bugs and provides new features is also faster. Additionally there is talk that there has been a developmental exodus from the MySQL development team to MariaDB.

Anyway it is likely to expect MariaDB to overtake MySQL in the next few years and become the default web database choice and for MySQL to gradually step back from the limelight.

So this post briefly describes how you can install MariaDB on a Mac using Homebrew.

Installation - MariaDB

Clean up any old MariaDB/MySQL versions

Firstly ensure that you have removed all traces of any previous MariaDB or MySQL installations. This includes the log directories - so go ahead and check to see if directories like the one below still exists:

Especially if you are getting error messages like this:
mysqld: File '/usr/local/var/mysql/aria_log_control' not found (Errcode: 13)
This is most likely due to your permissions not being set up correctly.

Steps to install MariaDB

  1. Brew install
    From your terminal execute the following commands:

      brew install mariadb

  2. Build the default databases

     unset TMPDIR
 mysql_install_db --user=mysql --basedir=$(brew --prefix mariadb)

  3. Path settings
    Make sure that you have the following settings in your .bash_profile file:

      PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH" # if not already present

  4. Start the server
    You should now be able to start the MariaDB server:

      mysql.server start

    And stop it with:

      mysql.server stop

    Note you can also start it in safe mode with:

      sudo mysqld_safe

Nice Little Extras

Building the MySQL2 Ruby Gem

If you wish to run MariaDB with Ruby on Rails then you will want to compile the standard MySQL2 Gem. In order to do this it is best to set your ARCHFLAGS for your Mac's processor architecture.
In this case I am using 64 bit processor.:

    export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

Now for the MariaDB specific commands:

    sudo gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri mysql2 -- --with-mysql-dir=$(brew --prefix mariadb) --with-mysql-config=$(brew --prefix mariadb)/bin/mysql_config

With any luck this should all install fine.

Configuring for Speed

If you don't tune MySQL and leave default settings, performance will be terrible with production data. Make sure to apply this cnf before importing any data or creating a database.

Here is a sample /etc/my.cnf (good if you have 3GB+ RAM)

[mysqld]
thread_concurrency = 16
log-bin=mysql-bin
binlog_format=mixed
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:100M:autoextend
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1024M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M
innodb_log_file_size = 256M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 32M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M

[mysql]
no-auto-rehash

References

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A project by Ben Emson | @emson.