Author Archives: Daniel Black
Hi, we from the MariaDB Foundation are having a set of meetings with developers and senior managers from all over the world. We’d like your feedback on the Good/Bad/Ugly bits of MariaDB Server as you see it, and generally what we could be doing better. Please leave comments here, or Reddit, or email discuss@lists.mariadb.org (subscription), or email me directly daniel@mariadb.org.
This will be discussed at the MariaDB (Un)conference 2023 and MariaDB Server Fest 2023 which you are welcome to attend also to state your cases in person.
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“The only workload that matters is my production workload” (for all values of “my”). So you can manage this responsibility, SCARY is a software tool which aims to take the uncertainty out of change; software, configuration and hardware changes. This is very early in development, but projects have to start somewhere.
SCARY takes a read view of the production database query execution, and does the equivalent query on a copy of the production database, that has differences. The query speed, query plan, data result (eventually) will be recorded along with what went on in production.
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MariaDB Server 11.0 was recently released and its Docker Official Image didn’t include mysqladmin which broke the healthcheck in a few usage scenarios. This surprised some people in the change of behaviour. We have observed a number uses of the mysql names in containers, custom healthchecks and some /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d scripts. To help use these correctly, lets talk about what is available in the containers to help perform healthcheck and initialization functions.
On healthchecks, HEALTHCHECK isn’t there in Docker Official Images (for reasons), however the MariaDB Server container does have a healthcheck.sh script.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Server Docker Official Images Healthcheck without mysqladmin”
This is the next in a series of posts on our explorations with ChatGPT that started with ChatGPT, OpenAI and MariaDB Foundation. Here, we asked ChatGPT to generate a blog post, and Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Black reviewed the results.
“Getting Started with MariaDB: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners” is the question we asked ChatGPT. What we got is below. Rather than a blog on what you could have done yourself, I’ll look through the answer below and see how accurate it is, what could be better/worse, and assume this is some reflection on the references that the engine was trained on.
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Continue reading “Ask ChatGPT – Getting Started with MariaDB: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners”
As an Oracle compatibility syntax extension, the IN, OUT, and INOUT / IN OUT quantifiers of stored function parameters was requested in MDEV-10654. It was noted that Postgres and DB2 also support this syntax. A few years later thanks to our community contributor Manohar KB of Rakuten Securities Japan, this functionality was created. Alexander Barkov from the MariaDB Corporation provided reviews and extended this PL/SQL syntax to be available in the non SQL_MODE=ORACLE mode of SQL/PSM.
Having OUT parameters on functions enables the nesting of functions will multiple return values where previously there was only the single return value possible.
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Continue reading “10.8 preview feature: IN, OUT, INOUT, IN OUT parameters in CREATE FUNCTION”
MariaDB does have bugs. Users see them sometimes. Sometimes developers look for a long time at bug reports and code and still cannot see how the situation occurred. Developers during their analysis ask questions like:
- I wonder if this was already fixed in {not released version}? But how can I ask a user to test that?
- Can I get the user to get good stack trace that would help understand this better? But users sometimes find this hard.
- What exact hardware and kernel configuration is this bug occurring on? And how would I reproduce this?
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During the development of MariaDB, a lot of things are tested. However the most important workload to be tested is the one we don’t have access to, and that is your workload.
As many of you run your own CI, we’d like you to invite you to join the testing of MariaDB. quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel is a container repository using the latest from our main stable branches. By the time any code gets into these branches it has been reviewed and passed our tests. The developers of the change consider it finished, so this is the perfect time to take this code and test it on your workload.
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Continue reading “New Service – quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel”
Everyone wants performance. Speeding up the insert into empty InnoDB tables and partitions is a common enough use case to optimize. Thirunarayanan Balathandayuthapani from the MariaDB Corporation wrote this improvement to the bulk inserting into InnoDB tables that is available as a preview for testing.
To achieve this, if the table is empty then InnoDB will pre-sort the records for each index, and build the indexes one page at a time. If the transaction does bulk insert operation then InnoDB should create buffer of size innodb_sort_buffer_size for each index.
If the buffer ran out of memory then InnoDB will create a temporary file for storing the data.
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