Announcing Portable MariaDB: Small, portable binary MariaDB distribution for Linux

Portable MariaDB is a small, portable binary distribution of the SQL server MariaDB (Monty's fork of MySQL) for Linux i386 (32-bit). Only the mysqld binary and a versatile init script are included. Portable MariaDB can be run by any user in any directory, it doesn't try to access any mysqld data or config files outside its directory. Portable MariaDB can coexist with regular mysqld (MySQL or MariaDB) and other instances of Portable MariaDB on a single machine, as long as they are not configured to listen on the same TCP port. The only dependency of Portable MariaDB is glibc 2.4 (available in Ubuntu Hardy or later).

The most up-to-date documentation of Portable MariaDB is here.

The sources are here.

Why use Portable MariaDB?

• It's small (not bloated). Fast to dowload, fast to extract, fast to install. Quick size comparison: mariadb-5.2.9-Linux-i686.tar.gz is 144 MB, the corresponding Portable MariaDB .tbz2 is less than 6 MB.
• It's portable: does not interfere with other MySQL server installations on the same machine.
• It's self-contained and consistent: copy the database and the configuration in a single directory from one machine to another.

Installation

To run Portable MariaDB, you need a Linux system with glibc 2.4 (e.g. Ubuntu Hardy) or later. 32-bit and 64-bit systems are fine. For 64-bit systems you need the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed. You also need Perl.

  $ cd /tmp  # Or any other with write access.
  $ BASE=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pts/portable-mariadb/master/release
  $ #OLD: wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.2.9.tbz2
  $ wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.5.46.tbz2
  $ tar xjvf portable-mariadb.tbz2
  $ chmod 700 /tmp/portable-mariadb  # For security.
  $ /tmp/portable-mariadb/mariadb_init.pl stop-set-root-password

Usage

For security, don't do anything as root.

  $ cd /tmp/portable-mariadb
  $ ./mariadb_init.pl restart
  Connect with: mysql --socket=/tmp/portable-mariadb/mysqld.sock --user=root --database=test --password
  Connect with: mysql --host=127.0.0.1 --user=root --database=test --password

Feel free to take a look at /tmp/portable-mariadb/my.cnf, make modifications, and restart mysqld so that the modifications take effect.

Security

By default, connections are accepted from localhost (Unix domain socket and TCP) only, all MySQL users are refused (except if a password has been set for root above), and root has unrestricted access. Unix permissions (such as the chmod 700 above) are protecting against data theft and manipulation on the file level.

It is strongly recommended to change the password of root to a non-empty, strong password before populating the database.

Java support

Java clients with JDBC (MySQL Connector/J) are fully supported. Please note that Java doesn't support Unix doman socket, so make sure in my.cnf that mysqld listens on a TCP port. Please make sure you have ?characterEncoding=UTF8 specified in your JDBC connection URL, otherwise some non-ASCII, non-Latin-1 characters would be converted to ?.

Unicode support

Just as with MariaDB. All encodings and collations are supported. The latin1 encoding is the default, which can be changed in my.cnf.

Language support

All natural languages (of MariaDB) are supported for error messages. Set the `language' flag in my.cnf accordingly. English is the default.

How to try the latest MariaDB on Linux

This blog post explains how to download and start the bleeding edge MariaDB on a fairly recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux system, for trial and development, the most straightforward way, without overwriting an existing MySQL installation or its data.

MariaDB is an improved, backward compatible, drop-in replacement of the MySQL Database Server, by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original author of MySQL.

Please note that parts of this blog post are obsolete. See also the new blog post.

The simplest download and startup instructions for MariaDB 5.2.1 for 32-bit (i386, i686) Linux systems is the following:

# Stop any MySQL server currently running.
$ wget -O /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 \
  http://pts-mini-gpl.googlecode.com/files/mariadb-compact-5.2.1-beta-linux-i386.tbz2
$ cd /tmp
$ tar xjvf mariadb-compact.tbz2
$ cd mariadb-compact
$ ./bin/mysqld --datadir=$PWD/data --pid-file=$PWD/mysqld.pid \
  --socket=$PWD/mysqld.sock --language=$PWD/share/mysql/english \
  --log-error=/proc/self/stderr
...

To stop the server, press Ctrl-Backslash, Enter in the window mysqld_safe is running, and wait 15 seconds for the process to exit.

To connect to the server, install the MySQL client. (e.g. with $ sudo apt-get install mysql-client on an Ubuntu system), and then run

$ mysql --socket=/tmp/mariadb-compact/mysqld.sock --user=root --database=test

or

$ mysql --host=127.0.0.1 --user=root --database=test

to connect. Please note that mariadb-compact comes with insecure default settings: it lets anyone connect as user root (on TCP 127.0.0.1:3306 (but not on other IP addresses) and on the Unix socket as well) without a password. Please use the appropriate mysqladmin commands (or modify the tables mysql.user, mysql.host and mysql.db directly) to set up access restrictions. use the --skip-networking flag of mysqld to prevent it from listening on TCP ports (not even 127.0.0.1:3306).

FYI Here is how mariadb-compact.tbz2 was created from the official MariaDB Linux binaries. The official download was located on http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download:MariaDB_5.2.1-beta, and then the following commands were executed:

$ wget -O /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz \
  http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/MariaDB/mariadb-5.2.1-beta/\
  kvm-bintar-hardy-x86/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz
$ mkdir -p /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ cd /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ tar xzvf /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686/\
  {bin/mysqld{,_safe},bin/my_print_defaults,scripts/mysql_install_db,\
  share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys,share/fill_help_tables.sql,\
  share/mysql_fix_privilege_tables.sql,share/mysql_system_tables.sql,\
  share/mysql_system_tables_data.sql,share/mysql_test_data_timezone.sql}
$ cd mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686
$ strip -s bin/mysqld
$ ./scripts/mysql_install_db --basedir="$PWD" --force --datadir="$PWD"/data
$ rm -rf scripts
$ rm -f share/*.sql
$ cd ..
$ mv mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686 mariadb-compact
$ tar cjvf /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 mariadb-compact
$ rm -rf /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz
$ rm -rf /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ ls -l /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 
-rw-r--r-- 1 pts pts 4194393 Aug  8 18:10 /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2

The script mysql_install_db creates the initial databases and tables (e.g. the mysql.user table used for authentication) in the data directory.

All the other commands above just extract the absolute minimum necessary files from the official binary distribution, strip the binaries, and create a small .tbz2 archive.

Please note that the binaries in the official binary distributions are dynamically linked:

$ ldd bin/mysqld
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7727000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnsl.so.1 (0xb76f9000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xb76f0000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb76d6000)
        libwrap.so.0 => /lib/libwrap.so.0 (0xb76cd000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb76c9000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libresolv.so.2 (0xb76b5000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libcrypt.so.1 (0xb7683000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7590000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb756a000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7425000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7728000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7407000)

It would be straightforward to create the 64-bit version of mariadb-compact.tbz2, by starting from a different official binary distribution (http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/MariaDB/mariadb-5.2.1-beta/kvm-bintar-hardy-amd64/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz), and modifying the the commands above appropriately.

A newer version (5.2.9) of this precompiled 32-bit Linux MariaDB is new available: http://pts-mini-gpl.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/portable-mariadb.release/portable-mariadb.tbz2. Here is the shell script which generated it from the official MariaDB 5.2.9 sources: http://code.google.com/p/pts-mini-gpl/source/browse/trunk/portable-mariadb/build-mariadb.sh. Here is the newer blog post: http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2011/11/announcing-portable-mariadb-small.html.