Author Archives: Frédéric Descamps
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”
You may have noticed that MySQL Workbench has not been actively developed for a long time… You can see the number of open bugs. And the number of commits illustrates this too:
In fact, Workbench has been put out of maintenance mode to add the MySQL HeatWave Migration Assistant to OCI. Not less, no more.
On some versions, it is no longer able to connect to a MariaDB Server, or to use it on new OSes (Fedora 43, recent macOS, …).
These kinds of GUI tools are very popular for developers, and I was surprised by the number of users Workbench had.
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We recently asked the community:
“Which MySQL-compatibility feature would you most like to see in the next MariaDB release?”
A big thank you to everyone who voted. We received 506 votes, and the results give us a helpful snapshot of which compatibility gaps feel most important to users right now.
Poll results
A two-feature race
The first thing that jumps out is how close the top two were.
MEMBER OF json operator (MDEV-38591) came in first with 145 votes, but bitwise operators for binary and bit types (MDEV-10526) were right behind it with 138 votes.
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Continue reading “What the MariaDB Community Wants Next: A Look at Our MySQL-Compatibility Poll”