MySQL 5.6 + GTID & MariaDB 10 replication
While at the keynote of Tomas Ulin at Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Santa Clara 2014, he asked the audience what they were running, and most of the audience was on MySQL 5.5 while about 15% of the audience was on MySQL 5.6. This number is steadily increasing I’m sure, so one thing that becomes important is that people will probably start turning on Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs).
As you may already know, MariaDB 10 has a different implementation of Global Transaction ID. To me, this poses a problem in a mixed use environment (or even a migration scenario). Which is why MDEV-4487 is so important: it is a feature request to allow replication from MySQL 5.6+ when GTID is enabled on the master.
If you think the issue is important, you can vote and watch the issue on JIRA. I for one think this should be fixed for 10.0.11 or 10.0.12 and not wait for the 10.1 timeframe. Best not to comment here, focus on the JIRA request, MDEV-4487.
MDEV-4487 probably should have an equivalent FR in bugs.mysql.com for the same reason :-)
Allowing interoperability between MariaDB and MySQL means there’s no fear of being locked in and no fear if adopting “the other software” and not being able to back out again should something go wrong. MariaDB seems to be making progress in being installed as the “default MySQL” in many distributions so while right now it may not be the primary “MySQL version” that may change.
Either way MariaDB and MySQL do seem to be branching away from each other. That may be inevitable, but from a “users point of view” is not ideal. You mention replication here (between systems), but the fact that GTID is implemented differently in both “forks” and it’s likely that MySQL 5.7 GA will have a different implementation of multi-source replication is only going to complicate things further. Other features and configuration settings are likely to also evolve differently too.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.