Migrating from MySQL to MariaDB and viceversa

Question

I am doing a research regarding migrating from MySQL to MariaDB and viceversa.

As it seems, the first part should be easy and not complicated as stated here: MariaDB versus MySQL - Compatibility

It is the "viceversa" part that botters me: MariaDB -> MySQL. I just could not find anything useful about this topic.

Can anyone help? Any advice, hint? Are there complications migrating from MariaDB back to MySQL?

Thank you so much.

Answer 1

If there is someone who should ever take care of migrating from MariaDB to MySQL, it would be Oracle. As Oracle pretends MariaDB does not exist (company politics-policies) , it also does not provide the possibility to migrate (which does not bother me personally, because being on MariaDB team I'd prefer people to chose it and stay there :)

Having said all the above, the migration should be straightforward, provided you do not use special features (so, no storage engines besides MyISAM/Innodb). You shutdown MariaDB, you save the data directory, remove MariaDB, install MySQL, copy the saved data directory back. In the worst case you'd need to remove parameters from my.ini/my.cnf that are not recognized by MySQL.

The point I'm trying to make is since persistent data formats for most commonly used storage engines are compatible, no data migration is required (at least not yet:)

Answer 2

It's very easy ton migrate Mysql to MariaDB (so, no storage engines besides MyISAM/Innodb).

1. Backup your database
2. Stop mysql server
3. Set your repositorie (http://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/), it's depend on your linux stack.
4. Execute commande line to install MariaDB.

But now migrate MariaDB to Mysql is more difficult. I have no solution yet for this operation. Since my last try i have crashed my server...