Author Archives: Andrew Hutchings
With the first quarter of 2024 out of the way, we can take a look at the contribution statistics for the last three months. For the Foundation, this has been a very busy quarter, we have had a few big events to prepare for and attend. As well as two very large projects we are working on (Catalogs and vector indexing). This has meant that it has been difficult for us to keep up with all the wonderful contributions.
That being said, over the coming quarter we will try to rectify this and have some plans to make things better in future.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, April 2024”
OK, MariaDB Server didn’t specifically win, but a project around the MariaDB Catalogs feature won and the team behind it was led by me. In this post, I shall dig into what the CloudFest Hackathon is, what we did there and why it is a big deal.
CloudFest and the Hackathon
CloudFest is an event that happens every year in Europa Park, which is normally an amusement park, located in Rust, Germany. It is a fantastic web hosting and cloud event that spans a whole week, and there are often a lot of entertainment events happening around the main event.
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Years ago, I watched a film with my children (now adults themselves) called Meet the Robinsons. A running theme from the film is that it is OK to make mistakes because it is from those mistakes we can learn and “keep moving forward”.
An unfortunate perfect storm of several problems occurred which meant that on the 21st February 2024, the mariadb:latest Docker image would not work with PHP and NodeJS clients. Now, one of the things I helped introduce into the MariaDB Foundation is the concept of doing post-mortems, not just when things go wrong but when they go right too.
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Continue reading “Post-mortem: PHP and MariaDB Docker issue”
With Intel QuickAssist Technology, you can see a 5x performance in your MariaBackup compression, and lower CPU usage as well. Today I’m going to show you how.
What is Intel QuickAssist?
Nearly a decade ago, Intel released a technology called QuickAssist, which started out as a PCI-e card and then became integrated in many Xeon processes starting with the Skylake generation. QuickAssist Technology (often called QAT) is a special unit that the CPU can offload compression and encryption tasks onto.
I was lucky enough to have early access to this technology back when it was new.
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Continue reading “Accelerating MariaBackup with Intel QuickAssist”
It is the start of a new year, and with that brings the start of a new quarter, which means it is time for a contribution statistics update from us. I have lots of interesting data to walk you through this time, so let’s get started.
Year On Year Comparison
A good place to start would be to compare the previous year gone by with last year to see how we did. This table shows the number of organisations, contributors and commits to MariaDB Server in the last few years. The “Non-MariaDB” lines are contributors and commits by people who are not employed by MariaDB Plc or MariaDB Foundation.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January 2024”
We are in October, which means it has been 4 months since the last metrics report. It is, therefore, time for another quarterly metrics report (plus a bit more). The extra month was to allow for an announcement which is a prerequisite for this post, and it also means we are more or less aligned to real quarters. The major changes to this will come in the second half of this post, we have lots of additional data for pull requests. With that, let’s get started.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2023”
There was a recent request by Eric Herman, the Chairperson of the MariaDB Foundation board, to add the time to first meaningful response for pull requests to the quarterly contributor metrics I generate and blog about. I thought this was a really good idea. There are a few problems with this, the first being the definition of “meaningful response”.
Meaningful Response
A “meaningful response” would likely be a response that adds value and shows that the pull request is being reviewed. The most accurate way to do this would be to manually record this using a set of criteria that defines what kind of responses are meaningful.
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We are well into 2023 now, the time has really flown. There have already been two major versions of MariaDB Server that have reach GA, and with those, many new contributions. As with each quarterly metrics release, the raw data is available in our metrics repo, along with the scripts and configurations to generate it yourself.
Project Tracking
We are tracking multiple MariaDB related projects at the moment, many of which are pulled in when you build MariaDB Server. These include:
- MariaDB Server – the server itself
- libmarias3 – an open source library to talk to Amazon S3 and related block storage services.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, June 2023”