Georgi Kodinov, Author at MariaDB.org

Who says developing MariaDB plugins is hard? I was able to produce one in under 3 minutes!

I of course did it by asking Grok nicely:

The produced result is actually very decent:

/*
errorwatch.c – MariaDB Audit API plugin

Records statement execution errors into a dedicated log file.

This plugin subscribes to the GENERAL audit class and logs
events of type MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_ERROR (and STATUS events
that carry a non-zero error code). It writes structured
entries to /var/log/mariadb/errorwatch.log (or /tmp/ fallback).

To build (inside MariaDB source tree):
1. Copy this file and CMakeLists.txt to plugin/errorwatch/
2. …

Continue reading “Vibe-coding an Audit Plugin in Under 3 Minutes”

If you ever considered contributing code to the MariaDB server, you should know that this is an intricate process involving multiple steps and multiple actors. To help you see your contributions successfully merged into the MariaDB Server codebase I’ve compiled a comprehensive description of the contribution process itself, the roles involved into it, the sequence of actions and conditions for transition from one to another. There’s even a diagram!

Please go to COMMUNITY_CONTRIBUTIONS.md.

This of course is going to be a moving target! I fully intend to keep the document up to date and enhance it with clarifications and process changes as they happen.

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Continue reading “Documented: The MariaDB Server (Community) Contribution Process”

One of the corner stones in MariaDB Foundation’s mission is:

We strive to increase adoption by users and across use cases, platforms and means of deployment.

https://mariadb.org/about/

MariaDB Server plugins are definitely a prime “means of deployment” for server features. But a relatively neglected one so far. They have been around for many years. But, somehow, they have escaped the user’s focus. Why that happened is a very interesting topic. And one that I’d definitely like to hear your opinion on!

Which brings me to my main topic: How do we all change that?

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Continue reading “Unleashing Innovation Through Plugins”

I came across an excellent paper by the Linux Foundation. In it I find solid economical evidence for a very fundamental idea: contributions are the life-blood of an open source project.

Contributions in the broader sense (code, documentation, quality assurance, marketing, education, financial support) are central to every project. Open source or not. Giving users what they need and want is what makes any project appealing. It’s just that with open source, the cost to procuring these is not that directly attached to the actual use. So, there is a gap to cross between passive use and active participation.

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Continue reading “Contributions As a Cost-saver”

I wanted to share with you all some statistics on the incoming community contributions for the MariaDB server in the last year or so. And some of my thoughts looking at the data.

I’ve been quietly working on scripting some of my daily routines using the github CLI and the Jira REST API. Thanks to a question by Anna, the visionary MariaDB Foundation CEO, I’ve also created some scripts to fetch and summarize statistics on the incoming community contributions pull requests.

A picture’s worth a thousand words. So here we go:

This depicts the community pull requests opened or closed each month (the top graph).

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Continue reading “The Rising Tide of Community Contributions to MariaDB Server”

Inspired by my VERY long presentation on the topic at FOSDEM26 I thought I’d say a couple of words on how the contribution process works.

Contributing changes to MariaDB server is easy because it follows industry best practices: it’s using “normal” GitHub pull requests. Note that I’m working for the MariaDB Foundation. As such, “normal” for me is doing everything in the open, for everybody to see and participate. And all of the communication around the contribution (including the code review) is happening in that same pull request and is public. Until the intended end of the process: merging the pull request into the repository.

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Continue reading “The MariaDB contribution process: a step by step guide.”

Couple of weeks ago we’ve announced a poll for the Top external contribution of 2025. Thank you all that voted for the time you took to do so.

The vote was organized in two categories:

Organizations
Individuals

We are extremely happy to share that the winner of 2025 Top Contributor to MariaDB award.

In this section the Winner is:

MDEV-36737 Research and Estimation for Adapting VIDEX to MariaDB!

Congratulations to ByteDance and Haibo Yang (YoungHypo) and Rong Kang (kr11)!

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Continue reading “And The Winners Of The Inaugural Top External Contributor To MariaDB Award are …”

It’s the time of the year to look back and reflect. In line with the holiday spirit, we’d like to highlight some of the MariaDB Server contributions from 2025 that the team found particularly inspiring and interesting, and to say thank you to everyone who submitted them.

At the end of the post, we invite the community to help us recognise the most impactful external contributions of the year.