In case someone is playing with the idea, just updated production Squeeze to Wheezy and changed DB from MySQL to MariaDB leaving node-mysql in place
zappa 4.10 (node 8.10,express 3.0,coffeescript) + MariaDB5.5 + node-mysql on Debian Wheezy (3.2.0-3-amd64)
All running smoothly without *any* changes from what I can see