As most of you know, Sun acquired MySQL (and later Oracle acquired Sun), and during these acquisitions, there were a lot of FUD in MySQL community which resulted in creation of various forks.

Today we have MySQL from MySQL, Percona (XtraDB) MySQL, OurDelta MySQL, MariaDB, Drizzle to name a few. Which brings us to the source of the problem.

We are in the process of upgrading our databases (hardware/software) and I would like to know which one of the forks should I go with. Each has their own set of pros/cons. We are currently using MySQL 5.0.x from MySQL/Linux on an 8-core machine. Our new hardware is a monster with 32 cores and 32GB of memory connecting to a fast NetApp Storage via FC.

I would like to stick with MySQL from MySQL but I have heard horror stories on how badly MySQL 5.1 performs on many cores. I have also heard that MySQL 5.4 performs better on multi-core machines but that's still not production ready. In addition, I have also heard a lot of good things about Percona builds.

This is what I know so far:

MySQL 5.1 from MySQL: Reliable choice, but doesn't scale well on a big machine

Percona: Scales well, good backing company. I don't have much experience with it

MariaDB: Don't know much about it besides that it was founded by Original MySQL developers (including Monty)

OurDelta: Don't know much

Drizzle: Mostly optimized for cloud computing

I would like to know what's the general notion about this problem. Which build/version should I go with? How are you guys picking your builds/versions?

Thanks!