Brandoo and WordPress Now Completely Broken: Moved Back to MySQL on Ubuntu

cwoodill Azure

Brandoo is an open source plugin for WordPress that translates MySQL to SQL Server.  As performance increased on this blog, the free database provided by ClearDB wasn’t cutting it and I moved to Azure SQL using the Brandoo plugin.

I received a note from the author of the plugin saying it was no longer supported and continued to use the plugin because it was working. 

As of WordPress 4.2, Brandoo finally broke altogether.  The blog continued to work but the upgrade process failed and I couldn’t get access to my blog at all from an administration perspective.  I couldn’t also post any new blog posts.

So over the past week, I have re-architected my blog to go back to MySQL as this seems to be the only reliable way to run WordPress.  Instead of using the free MySQL database from ClearDB, I have set up a dedicated linux VM for running MySQL in Azure.  This seems to work remarkably well, even with the smallest VM – MySQL is very efficient at running in a small VM footprint.

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For those looking to go this route, have a read through this article – I found it very helpful in setting up Ubuntu, MySQL and then connecting it to Azure Web Sites.

cwoodill

  • Martin

    How did you recover your MSSQL data back to MySQL?

    • Christopher Woodill

      I did an export to xml of all the content (posts and comments) from my daily backup and then imported them into the new setup so no need to recover database to database directly.

  • Daniel

    Unfortunately, I found your posts regarding this too late. I used the Brandoo setup for a group project in class and it was very slow. Many sites broke and had connection errors. I now recommended the students to switch to a VM as well, but ditch the webapp completely. So, using Bitnami WordPress you can setup a VM running Ubuntu LAMP with WordPress running, e.g. https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress/cloud/azure
    This is much faster than the Brandoo sites ever were. The new ones run not as a “webapp” but rather “cloud service”, seem to be faster, more robust, and actually cheaper as well. Using BackupBuddy or a similar tool one could move the sites and the DB content.