Red Hat Replaces MySQL with MariaDB

This year's Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts was site of several announcements for the world's largest Linux company. One of the more interesting developments is that Red Hat has decided to replace MySQL with MariaDB in future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Several other Linux distros have already announced a migration to MariaDB, so Red Hat's announcement was not exactly a surprise, but this change in course for a major enterprise product such as RHEL could significantly tip the scales in favor of MariaDB. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was founded and is maintained by the creator of MySQL: Michael "Monty" Widenius. Widnius had a falling out with Oracle, who came into ownership of MySQL after purchasing Sun. MariaDB is designed as a substitute for MySQL that administrators can use without modification.
Because Red Hat and Oracle are competitors, Red Hat did not want to be dependent on Oracle for such a key component of the application stack. Red Hat engineers want the option of contributing patches and fixes directly to the database system, and one could easily imagine they were experiencing problems working with Oracle.  A version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with MariaDB is expected in  the second half of 2013.
Red Hat also announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.2. The biggest new feature of this version is storage live migration, which allows a virtual machine to move online to another storage domain without interrupting the operation. RHEV also now supports the latest CPUs, including Intel's Haswell series, AMD Opteron, and PowerPC G5 processors.