Author Archives: Georgi Kodinov
Inspired by some recent LinkedIn posts, I decided to take the AI in my own hands and do some stats on the MariaDB and MySQL repositories.
This graph is what I’ve got.
Not only have MariaDB Server distinct contributors surpassed the distinct MySQL Server contributors count! The External MariaDB contributors alone did! *
This is how the Power Of the Community looks like!
- You get to use a more functional, performant and error free MariaDB Server
- You get a say in shaping the future of the MariaDB Server.
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We have a new record average time to process a pull request: 21 days!
Part of my job is following (and trying to improve of course) some key metrics about MariaDB Server pull request processing. As a part of that I compile a nice pull request metric and a graph of it. This is what it looked like for the last month:
There’s a single number that caught my attention: 21.05 ! This is a new record low! That’s how much it takes on average from opening a pull request to closing it for all the requests closed last month!
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Continue reading “A New Pull Request Processing Time Record”
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.
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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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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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.”