Author Archives: Kaj Arnö
AI was everywhere at Intel Vision this week in London. Nearly every keynote and breakout presentation was centred around AI. I had the honour of being interviewed by Intel’s jovial Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell, who is just about as stereotypically German as his former neighbour from Stuttgart Jürgen Klopp (whom he referenced on-stage), namely: not at all.
Staying German but perhaps a tad less Klopp-like, Thomas Bach was one of many interviewed on-stage by Christoph. The president of the International Olympic Committee nevertheless impressed me by his quick-witted reply to Christoph’s question as to how AI would have made an impact if it had been in place during Thomas Bach’s fencing career.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Vector at Intel Vision – AI Everywhere”
A healthy ecosystem around MariaDB Server involves an active community. Lots of happy code contributors cause fast development of new functionality, as well as increased adoption by users. Users see the vibrancy of the contributor space as a sign of health, rightfully so. Hence, preventive health care “with daily exercise and good eating habits” is high on the agenda of MariaDB Foundation.
But in practice, improving MariaDB’s habits around code development is about as easy as improving individual life habits in general, particularly if you are under public scrutiny. Let me here share a few thoughts on our progress, and solicit some input.
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We say: Put your AI vectors into your RDBMS …
Relational databases are where AI data belongs. Users need their vectors along with the rest of their data, in a standard database which offers performance, scalability, and all the other traditional virtues, such as ACID compliance.
This is why we are developing MariaDB Vector. Expect to see a first preview release later this month.
… but don’t take our word for it – ask Amazon!
Now, we’re not alone in advocating the above logic. That’s probably because the logic makes sense. The best articulation of the logic of “you want your Gen AI integrated in your relational database” I’ve heard is by MariaDB Foundation Board Member Sirish Chandrasekharan, General Manager of Amazon Relational Database Services.
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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.
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Continue reading “How MariaDB and MySQL performance changed over releases”
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.
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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.
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Continue reading “MariaDB plc – looking forward to business as usual”
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.
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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.
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Continue reading “Adjusting the MariaDB Server release model”