The noinstall package is a ZIP archive that allows us to execute MariaDB on Windows systems without installing it. This is not the optimal way for executing MariaDB; however, this allows us to start using it quickly. For testing purposes, studying purposes, or for any trivial usage, a noinstall package can be acceptable.

To start using MariaDB without installation, all we have to do is to unpack the archive using a file archiver utility that is able to work with the ZIP format.

MariaDB can be copied to any path, and any valid name can be used for its directory. Commonly used paths for MariaDB on Windows are C:\MariaDB and C:\MariaDB 10.0.

MariaDB can be installed on Windows from a .MSI package. It displays a graphical interface, which guides us through some simple steps, as follows:

The first step is merely a welcome text which informs us about the MariaDB version that we are going to install.

Then we are asked to accept the GPL license, which states the user's rights. We have a Print button here in case we prefer to read the license on paper.

To be able to go to the next step, we need to declare that we accept the license by checking the I accept the terms in the License Agreement checkbox, as seen in the following screenshot:

In the next step, we are asked to select the components to be installed. The component Database instance is necessary for a new installation. But this step can be skipped if we want to use an existing database, perhaps one created with an older version of MariaDB or with MySQL. However, in this case, please go through the Upgrading MariaDB section given later in this chapter for details.

Then we are asked to set some basic options. First, we need to choose a password for the user root. We need to set this twice. If we skip this, the root user will have no password. This is acceptable if we are just installing MariaDB on our local machine for development purposes, but is usually a bad idea in other cases. Moreover, disabling remote access for the root user is usually recommended.

By creating an anonymous account, we allow non-authenticated users to access MariaDB. This can be convenient on a local development machine, but, again, this is generally a bad practice in other cases.

By default, MariaDB uses the latin1 character set. This is usually acceptable for American users as well as many European users, though with latin1, it is not possible to store names using non-Latin character sets. Nowadays, in most cases, it is preferable to use UTF8 or UTF8MB4.

Now we need to decide if we want to install MariaDB as a service or not. If it is installed as a service, it starts at the time of system startup, and gracefully stops on system shutdown. In this case, the default name for the service is MySQL for compatibility reasons, but we can change it. We can also change the port number. The Optimize for transactions option should usually be checked. It means that InnoDB will be used as the default storage engine, which is the optimal choice in almost all situations. We are also asked to set the size for the InnoDB cache. For production purposes, it's a good choice to set it up at two-thirds of the available memory. It should also be able to contain all the data that we store in the InnoDB tables. If we are not sure, we can use the default value.

We are also asked if we want to install the Feedback plugin. This plugin, when active, periodically sends our database's usage statistics to the MariaDB project servers. No private data is sent.


Finally, MariaDB is installed, and we receive a message that informs us that the installation was successful.

If we want to use the MariaDB official repositories, we need to configure our system before installing MariaDB.

The MariaDB Foundation provides a web wizard that allows us to do this by following very easy steps. This tool is available at the following URL:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/

First, we must inform the tool about what we are using and what we want to install. The following screenshot shows the tool:

We will just need to follow four simple steps:

At this point, in the lower part of the page, we can see the exact steps to be followed for setting up the specified official mirror in our system. The steps to install MariaDB may or may not be included. If they are not, we will follow one of the next sections, or our system's documentation.

The .deb packages are used in Debian GNU/Linux and in all the derived Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. These packages can be installed using apt-get, aptitude, or the graphical package manager synaptic. These tools are generally preinstalled in the distributions derived from Debian.

We can install the mariadb-server and mariadb-client meta-packages to install the most recent stable MariaDB version that is available in the repository, including the command-line clients and tools. The following packages are optional but useful, and provide features that will be discussed in this book:

We can update the local list of packages, and then install MariaDB using apt-get using the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client mariadb-connect-engine-10.0 mariadb-oqgraph-engine-10.0

Note that this code snippet includes the optional packages mentioned previously.

The .rpm packages are used in Linux distributions derived from Red Hat, including the community distribution Fedora, the enterprise-level CentOS, SuSE, and Mandriva. To manage these packages, we can use the YUM or up2date tools.

To install the latest version of the MariaDB server and client tools, we need to install the MariaDB-server and MariaDB-client, as follows:

sudo yum update
sudo yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

Installing MariaDB on Gentoo Linux is very simple. We can use the emerge package to install the proper eBuild. The code is as follows:

emerge –sync
emerge --ask mariadb

Only in cases where we want MariaDB to automatically start on system boot, can we run the following:

rc-update add mysql default

The MariaDB generic binaries can be useful for installing MariaDB on Linux distributions and other UNIX systems for which a specific package does not exist. Moreover, advanced users can modify the general installation procedure to customize the installation.

Users who install MariaDB from generic binaries for Linux/UNIX should be aware of two aspects:

The following procedure should work on all Linux systems. If a problem occurs, we should check our system's documentation.

useradd -r mysql
cd /usr/local
tar zxvf /path/to/<package_name>
ln -s <mariadb_dir> mysql
cd mysql
chown -R mysql .
chgrp -R mysql .
scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
chown -R root .
chown -R mysql data

We will need to replace <package_name> with the name of the file, and <mariadb_dir> with the name of the file without the .tar.gz extension.

Note that, with this procedure, we can install any number of MariaDB or MySQL versions. Each version will have its own subdirectory inside /usr/local. A symbolic link called /usr/local/mysql will point to the version of MariaDB/MySQL in use. Also note that, with this procedure, each installation will have its own data directory, which means that data will not be shared. The data directory should be configured in the my.cnf file. You also need to configure a different port or Unix socket for each instance if you want to run them at the same time.