Progress Reporting in MariaDB 5.3

There are many new features in MariaDB 5.3. I’m looking forward to many of them, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is Progress Reporting.

It’s a fact of life in the database world that some commands take longer to run than others. Commands like ALTER TABLE, LOAD DATA INFILE, and adding and dropping an index simply take time to run, depending (of course) on your data and schema. I always have hated having to wait for those commands to run with no indication of how much progress has been made or how much is left to do. …

How the MariaDB download system works

During my years at MySQL AB I had the unfortunate task of manually maintaining the download page for enterprise customers. This involved a ton of boring, error prone work and almost always led to some sort of error every release. Some of our downloads were eventually replaced with an automated system written by the web team but the memory of all that time wasted still hurts me. So when I joined Monty Program and saw our downloads were manually maintained in mediawiki I knew something had to change.

Most of the websites for Monty Program and the MariaDB project are written with Django so this is where I started. …

OLX and MariaDB

OLX, a free classifieds site, is serving up 40 million pages a day using MariaDB. Not an insignificant task.

There’s a nice write-up in the MariaDB knowledgebase with particulars. In short, the 5.2 series of MariaDB and some of the unique features of the project have made a migration easy and valuable.

It’s nice to hear such stories. Both because we like interesting sites and projects, as well as our natural interest in larger scale or larger visibility deployments. Got a story to share? Please create a KB entry, or e-mail the community team. …

MariaDB 5.2.7 released!

Quick pointer that MariaDB 5.2.7 is now released. Highlights from the release notes: RHEL 5 RPMs (in addition to the CentOS 5 RPMs), and the inclusion of the HeidiSQL GUI client for the Windows MSI package. As always, the complete changelog, and what are you waiting for – download it now and give it a try!

Mac OS X users can install MariaDB via Homebrew

The gist of it is, if you’ve installed Mac OS X and you use Homebrew, you’ll be pleased to note that you’re just a brew install away for getting a working MariaDB. Yes, that’s right, simply do: brew install mariadb and that’s it — you’ll have MariaDB (currently 5.2.6) installed in no time. For further documentation and a step-by-step guide, visit the Knowledgebase article: Building MariaDB on Mac OS X using Homebrew.

Setting up MariaDB repositories for Debian/Ubuntu

If you run Debian or Ubuntu, and want a way to auto-generate a sources.list entry, then you should definitely look at: Setting up Repositories for Ubuntu/Debian. Its very simple: choose a distribution, then a release, then choose what version of MariaDB you would like to track and a mirror of your choice, and voila! it generates the sources.list for you.