How MariaDB and MySQL performance changed over releases

Is performance important for you, along with the latest features and long-term support? Go with MariaDB 11.4. But don’t take our word for it. We asked well known benchmarking expert Mark Callaghan to check out a number of MariaDB and MySQL releases, hit them hard with a tool of his choice, and share his findings.

MariaDB’s performance is stable over the years

The outcome: On the low concurrency load (high concurrency results are being prepared), MariaDB maintained stable performance over the last 10 years and 14 releases, while MySQL performance dropped almost by a third.

MariaDB Server 11.4 will be LTS

MariaDB Server 11.4 will be a long-term support release, on top of our current plan.

Early February, we announced that we were adjusting the MariaDB Server release model. As part of that, we already announced our move towards a yearly LTS cycle. To get our current features earlier into broad use, we have decided to make an LTS now, to cater for the needs of MariaDB 11 users expecting a full five years of bug fixes in a release with a locked feature set.

The goal of this additional LTS is to encourage a broader adoption of MariaDB Server 11.4.

MariaDB plc – looking forward to business as usual

From near and from far, the same thing – in this case MariaDB plc – can look quite different. It’s all doom and gloom in an Infoworld article on MariaDB plc Can MariaDB’s enterprise business be saved? and its French translation in Le Monde Informatique L’activité entreprise de MariaDB bientôt liquidée ?

The turbulence seems exaggerated

True, our mission to provide Continuity is there to give users – including MariaDB plc customers – the confidence needed to continue using MariaDB Server under all circumstances. However, the turbulence portrayed in the press gives an unnecessarily bleak picture.

FOSDEM 2024 follow-up

What a FOSDEM weekend in Brussels! This was MariaDB Foundation’s best FOSDEM ever, although it wasn’t a FOSDEM at all. Confused? Stay tuned.

A live migration from MySQL 5.7

The highlight in several respects was the live migration of the Cantamen cluster from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.11.

Currently, cantamen operates a MySQL 5.7 master-slave-replication cluster as backbone for our Carsharing system software solution “EBuS”. We are the leading provider in this market serving some 10.000 vehicles for roughly estimated 150.000 users. Three database schemas with some 550 tables fill about 412 GB of hard disk space on the 128-GB-RAM-equipped servers.

Adjusting the MariaDB Server release model

We changed our release model two years ago

A bit over two years ago, MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB plc jointly announced what we called our new Innovation Release Model. Since the end of 2021, we have gained experiences from it, some of which were aired by Sergei Golubchik last October in a MariaDB Unconference presentation called The Past, the Present and the Future of the MariaDB release model (a 23:05 long video).

We spoke about an emphasis on more frequent new features, and an increased engagement with the community through four yearly opportunities for contributors to see their code merged.

FOSDEM Fringe Schedule is Up

The schedule is up! https://mariadb.org/fest2024-brussels/

We are lucky and happy to have a great line-up of presenters for the MariaDB Server Fest 2-3 Feb 2024, a FOSDEM Fringe event during the Friday and Saturday of the FOSDEM weekend in Brussels.

Please join us in person in Brussels!

The event is, quite like FOSDEM this year, a physical one. You are welcome to join it in person, for free – less than 2 km from the university where FOSDEM convenes.

Friday is Migration and Money …

We start on Friday before FOSDEM itself, with the “Migration and Money” day.

Feeling good: End-of-year recap of 2023

Our Sea Lion celebrates the end of a successful year, with a touch of Christmas spirit. We asked our AI Santa to create artwork that “evokes a sense of gratitude, optimism, and the magic of the holidays beneath the waves” – let me accompany the outcome with some reflections on the successful ending of the year.

Homework:  What makes you feel good?

The trigger for the reflections was the last team Zoom meeting of the year, on Tuesday. I had asked everyone to prepare by doing a personal recap of what has happened the last three months (basically since our Staff meeting, (Un)conference, and MariaDB Server Fest early October).

Looking for more migration guinea pigs

Remember our open letter, Looking for MySQL 5.7 or 8.0 guinea pigs?

We caught a nice German guinea pig!

We caught a nice guinea pig, a German one, from Hannover. They are currently using MySQL 5.7 (as was our prime wish), and they will be doing a live migration to MariaDB 10.11. They have 1.000.000.000 queries a day, their database size is 412 GB, and our goal is to the migration of the production data in less than five minutes – during our MariaDB Migration Workshop at our pre-FOSDEM event on Friday 2 Feb 2024.