Author Archives: Andrew Hutchings
Today, we are excited to announce a new fund to help give MariaDB Vector a high-quality integration into as many LLM frameworks as possible. This means that you can get rewarded for integrating MariaDB Vector into a known framework! This program will run until the end of February 2025.
How it will work
- Pick a framework: You need to pick one of the frameworks from the list curated by Qdrant that you would like to work on adding MariaDB Vector support to.
- Contact us: Contact us on the MariaDB Zulip, in the General channel, just create a topic.
…
Continue reading “Announcing the MariaDB Vector Bounty Program!”
Another quarter year has gone by, and in the world of MariaDB, it is time for another contributions report. The raw data for this report can be found on GitHub, here.
Server contributions
Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server so far this year.
| MariaDB Plc | 29 | 1262 |
| MariaDB Foundation | 6 | 123 |
| Codership | 7 | 77 |
| Independent | 17 | 57 |
| Amazon | 12 | 50 |
| Arch Linux | 1 | 6 |
| GSoC | 3 | 5 |
| IONOS | 1 | 4 |
| Alibaba | 1 | 3 |
| Rakuten | 1 | 3 |
| HardenedBSD | 1 | 2 |
| OpenBSD | 1 | 2 |
| University of Sydney | 1 | 2 |
| Arm | 1 | 1 |
| Chainguard | 1 | 1 |
| ClearCode | 1 | 1 |
| FreeBSD | 1 | 1 |
| IBM | 1 | 1 |
MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 8th October 2024
There have been some interesting things to note here.
…
Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024”
Update 2024-10-15: The event has been cancelled in favour of something better. Please see the end of this post.
On the 24th – 25th October 2024 we will be hosting our first-ever Hackathon as part of our larger MariaDB Foundation presence around Open Source India.
What is a Hackathon?
If you have never done one before, it is basically a fun and challenging technology event where the goal is to create new things. Attendees are split into small teams of 5-10 people. An open source project is chosen to create and/or improve upon, and you have a day to work on it (and night as well if you really want to).
…
Continue reading “Announcing the first MariaDB Hackathon – in India!”
I recently helped two of our sponsors simultaneously, DBS Bank and MariaDB Plc, with a recent issue they were experiencing. This actually helped us add support for an extra cloud vendor. But before I tell the story, I first need to give a bit of background.
S3 Engine History
Back in 2019, we added the S3 engine to MariaDB Server. “S3” stands for “Simple Storage Service”, it was developed by Amazon, and it is pretty much the standard for storing objects (typically files) in the cloud. Almost every cloud vendor has their own object storage with an S3-compatible REST API.
…
Continue reading “MariaDB Foundation assisting multiple vendors”
As you have probably seen in earlier posts, the preview version of MariaDB Vector is out and ready for you to play with. We have had input from several different places during the development of this feature. This, of course, includes hardware manufacturers such as Intel.
In the background, Intel have been prototyping using AVX512 instructions for dot product and bloom filter. Both of these are functions are part of vector searches. If you haven’t heard of these terms, let me try and break them down.
AVX-512 – 512-bit extensions to the Intel Advanced Vector Extension
The AVX512 instructions themselves are CPU specific instructions that are designed to run calculations on large vectors of numbers simultaneously.
…
Continue reading “Intel improving the performance of MariaDB Vector”
We recently had a public vote on whether “main” or a version branch should be the default. The results in favour of “main” were very clear. It has been just over a month, but behind the scenes we have been laying the groundwork for this to happen.
We think we are as ready as we can be, so with the opening of development for 11.7, we have switched to “main” as the default branch for MariaDB Server. This means that all new feature development should now target the “main” branch when contributing to MariaDB Server.
…
On the 3rd of July, two weeks ago, I created a poll to ask about the future of feature development branches in MariaDB Server. Specifically, whether we should switch to a rolling model which is more familiar to users of services such as GitHub.
The votes we received gave a very clear result. Today I will share the conclusions we drew, as well as setting expectations for what will happen next.
Recap: what is this “main” branch all about?
In a rolling model, there is one main branch of the tree that all the feature commits go into (typically called “main”), and this is then forked when it is time to prepare a major release.
…
Continue reading “MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main””
We are half way through the year! Where has the time gone?! This means that is time to talk contributions statistics. The raw data used for this blog post can be found on the metrics GitHub repo.
Server contributions so far
The following table contains the basic contribution stats for MariaDB Server in 2024 so far. We have contributions from almost twice as many non-MariaDB organisations as last quarter, which is fantastic to see. The more varied our contribution sources, the better.
| MariaDB Plc | 29 | 923 |
| MariaDB Foundation | 6 | 64 |
| Codership | 6 | 48 |
| Independent | 13 | 41 |
| Amazon | 11 | 28 |
| Arch Linux | 1 | 6 |
| GSoC | 2 | 4 |
| Alibaba | 1 | 2 |
| OpenBSD | 1 | 2 |
| University of Sydney | 1 | 2 |
| ARM | 1 | 1 |
| FreeBSD | 1 | 1 |
| IBM | 1 | 1 |
| Chainguard | 1 | 1 |
MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 2nd July 2024
Just like last time, we can almost do a like-for-like 2023 Q2 and 2024 Q2 comparison.
…
Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, July 2024”