On a stock CentOS installation ( DB wise, ie MySQL 5.1 ) we decided to roll out MariaDB. And it was wonderful, as all our LAMP apps didn't even seem to notice that something has changed. Not the same could be said about Redmine though...
First day of the year in the office, and a call came up "site isn't working". Browsing to the site, I noticed it couln't connect to the database. Thinking it was probably some glitch, I logged in remotely to the server, to find that the filesystem was readonly. After trying to figure out why me, being root, could not do anything to the filesystem... it rebooted. My first filesystem crash.
I recently tried moving from MySQL to MariaDB, and was truly surprised with the results - everything works just fine, didn't even have to recreate users/databases. Well, everything except Redmine (and I would assume, and other Passenger app).
There are more times than I can count that data needs to go from one format to another, two of the most popular being in a database and another being a text format. In my case, database equates to MySQL, and text format is something that can be derived easily from a CSV file. Thankfully, the whole process is quite simple.
Continuing from the Apache virtualhost article, this is another script that automates the creation of a MySQL database and a user with all permissions to it.
I just setup a development enviroment using Debian as my distro. I noted however that when using tasksel (the wizard during installation) to install an SQL server, I got PostgreSQL. Nothing personal with it, I just haven't used it much, and thus hate all the non-MySQL behaviour quirks it has. It just had to go.