Author Archives: Frédéric Descamps
Percona’s new 2026 benchmark report is interesting because it puts several MySQL-family releases on the same graphs and shares a public repository for the test harness. That openness is welcome. But after reading both the article and the published scripts, I do not think the post supports broad conclusions about “ecosystem performance,” and I especially do not think it represents an adequately tuned MariaDB, worthy of a neutral comparison.
Versions
The versions chosen for MariaDB are already a subject of debate. MySQL 9.6.0 (the latest Innovation Release) and MariaDB 12.1.2 (a rolling release) were used.
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One of the things I really like about open source is that a project is never only about the software.
Yes, code is important. Very important. But a project like MariaDB exists and grows because of people. People who contribute code, of course, but also people who help users, review bugs, write blog posts, speak at events, answer questions, test new features, build tools, and share knowledge with others.
This is exactly why I’m very happy to announce the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program.
It’s a new initiative to recognize the people who help make the MariaDB ecosystem stronger.
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Continue reading “Know a MariaDB champion? Submit a nomination”
Before I share my takeaway from this MariaDB observability poll, I would like to thank all participants and highlight that these recent polls are very popular, and your participation makes us happy.
That said, we recently asked the MariaDB community the following question:
Which observability tools do you use for MariaDB?
I like polls like this one.
Not because they are perfect. They are not.
Not because they replace real field experience. They do not.
But because sometimes they confirm, very clearly, what many of us already see in practice.
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If you’ve been around the MariaDB community for a while, you can probably feel it already: things are moving in the right direction.
And no, I’m not talking about one vanity metric, one lucky spike, or one noisy social post.
I’m talking about a broader trend.
The latest Adoption Index data shows something I really like to see: not one lucky spike, but multiple signals moving in the right direction at the same time.
Sometimes people want one number.
One chart. One KPI. One neat little story.
But open source projects do not work like that.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Keeps Climbing: Community, Adoption, and Momentum”
We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.0 series. MariaDB 13.0 is a preview rolling release, published on 23 March 2026, and it continues the work started in 12.3 while adding a solid set of entirely new features.
And this one is interesting.
This preview release brings a nice mix of new SQL capabilities, better optimizer insight, richer metadata, and practical engine improvements. Not every feature is flashy, but many of them are exactly the kind of changes that make daily work with MariaDB smoother, clearer, and just a bit more powerful.
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I am starting a new series on what makes MariaDB Server distinct from MySQL, highlighting innovations that make the difference.
MariaDB 12.3 introduces a new binary log implementation that stores binlog events directly in InnoDB-managed tablespaces rather than in separate flat files on disk.
This is an incredible innovation; for a long time, binary logs have been a performance bottleneck. DimK pointed it out several times. [1], [2]
The new binlog design halves the number of fsyncs and improves performance, as Mark Callaghan noted in his blog posts.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Innovation: InnoDB-Based Binary Log”
We recently asked the MariaDB community a simple question:
Where do you run MariaDB most in production?
The responses give a useful snapshot of how MariaDB is deployed today across our community:
The big takeaway: MariaDB remains strongly infrastructure-aware
The clearest signal from this poll is that MariaDB is still most commonly run in environments where users want a high degree of control over the underlying infrastructure.
The top two clearly defined deployment models, on-prem VMs and bare metal, account for the largest share of visible responses.
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Continue reading “Where does the Community run most MariaDB in production – results from the poll”
When dealing with queries in MariaDB, there are several approaches, such as the general query log, the slow query log, and the performance_schema.
The general query log is not recommended as it doesn’t contain much valuable information and can use a lot of resources when writing to the file on busy systems.
The slow query log is a much better option, as it contains many metrics and can be tuned. But if you want to collect everything, writing to the disk can also be an expensive operation.
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Continue reading “Improving MariaDB Observability with OpenSearch and Grafana”