Dropping support for MySQL


Foreman is essentially a Ruby on Rails application. A big one. And Ruby on Rails applications usually support multiple relational databases thanks to ActiveRecord stack. That’s also the case for Foreman. But it’s not that easy.

Foreman currently requires one of the following databases:

  • PostgreSQL 9.2 or newer
  • MySQL 5.5 or newer

This is not an extensive list you might think. Supporting two databases must not be that hard. Truth is, it’s a challenge.

Those two items on the list are both relational database systems with SQL standard, the problem is that very often behavior is different. Most of our development team use PostgreSQL and there are dozens of things that are different in MySQL. Therefore we need to identify those problems, find a way to fix them and then carry extra bit of code in our codebase for life. This takes a lot of our time we could invest in features, bugfixing or performance improvements.

We have dicussed preferring PostgreSQL many times, but the last time was different and we came to conclusion that dropping MySQL the right thing to do. The plan was then set and we are at the beginning of the journey where the first and really difficult step is on you, our users:

Foreman 1.24 will be the last version with MySQL support.

The upcoming versions 1.23 and 1.24 will also send a notification to all administrators in case it’s running on MySQL. Don’t worry, we will let you close the warning as soon as you see it, but we want to communicate this properly and in advance. We highly recommend to do the database migration to PostgreSQL right after upgrade to version 1.23 because if there is a blocker bug that prevents from migrating to MySQL, there is still a backup plan of holding off migration and staying on MySQL for one more release until we come up with a version which will be PostgreSQL only. This is important:

Do not wait with the migration for Foreman 1.24.

Along with the 1.23 release, we will provide official migration documentation, and mention it in our Release Notes as well. If you do such testing, please come back to us with time estimation so we can tell our users in advance what to expect.

It was not easy decision, we tried hard in the past to support both databases. If you search for PRs containing MySQL you’ll find countless workarounds, fixes and endless discussions about how to solve problems in a way that doesn’t break for PostgreSQL users. There is one common theme everywhere: most developers do not regularly use MySQL both for development and for production testing. This is compounded by the fact that the two commercial products based on Foreman, Red Hat Satellite and Atix Orcharhino, only support PostgreSQL, and many of the Foreman developers are employed by them. As none of their customers use MySQL, there is less testing and usage of it leading to longer times until bugs are discovered and fixed. Also, one of the biggest and most popular plugins, Katello, does not support MySQL, so many community users are not using it either.

We also think that dropping MySQL support is big enough reason to bump the major release version to 2.0. Chances are that PostgreSQL only version will not be versioned 1.25 but 2.0. The final decision will be made before the release process starts, but we wanted to let you know in advance.

We don’t stop here, we already have ideas for more improvements we could do once PostgreSQL is the only supported RDBM. For example:

  • hash indexes to save disk space and memory
  • macaddr, macaddr6, ip, ip6 types
  • JSON/JSONB type
  • data partitioning
  • full text search
  • stored procedures or functions
  • other performance optimalizations

There are many ways we can make Foreman better and stronger. Maybe you have your own ideas! We want feedback, visit us at https://community.theforeman.org and drop a comment.


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