Towards the end of last year, I was asked to investigate the Red Hat Software Collections by someone that popped by one of my talks. SkySQL has been working heavily with Red Hat, and with Fedora 19 shipping MariaDB as a default, it seems like MariaDB is getting even more distribution. The Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta is now available for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
From a database standpoint, users now get MariaDB 5.5. I encourage all to try it, as it is an in-situ upgrade. It is described as:
MariaDB version 5.5, which introduces an easy-to-adopt alternative for MySQL for Red Hat Enterprise Linux users. Binary compatibility allows MySQL users to drop-in MariaDB without converting data files.
Sweet. But for database users, it also includes MySQL 5.5 (better than 5.1.69), and PostgreSQL 9.2 (better than 8.4.13). After listening to Rasmus Lerdorf talk about PHP 5.4, I’m glad that I can now use it with RHEL6.
I wonder if there will be CentOS Software Collections as well?
Read an article in PCWorld about Software Collections (see a press release too). There’s some developer documentation from Red Hat, and some draft documentation from Fedora too.