Author Archives: Andrew Hutchings
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.
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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.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, July 2024”
Many countries in the world right now are hosting elections, in fact, my own country’s election is tomorrow. MariaDB Foundation is also asking for you to make one more vote on our own kind of referendum.
We have recently had a request by a member of the community to change how we use GitHub, in a way that, in-theory, will make things easier for community contributors. I’ll explain the current situation, the proposal and then the poll.
Current situation
At the moment, if you want to develop a new feature for MariaDB Server, it needs to be developed against the latest version branch, which is the default branch when you view on GitHub.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Have your say”
We normally announce releases and the end of life of releases, but today we are going to try something a little different, an announcement of “start of life”.
What does this mean?
The way we use GitHub is a little different to most projects. Instead of having a mainline and branching versions from that, MariaDB Server creates a new branch from the previous version. This is intended to happen shortly after the preview release of the previous version, but for various reasons it can come a little later. So by default, after the hypothetical version 11.7.0 is released, we will create the 11.8 branch in GitHub soon after.
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There are many forums in the past couple of years where I have talked about how non-code contributions are just as important to MariaDB Server and us at the MariaDB Foundation as the code contributions I typically help with. I’ve also highlighted in the past how Intel have provided some fantastic non-code contributions. They assist us by detecting performance issues on their new and future platforms, as well guidance in finding the root cause of these issues.
The outcome: Over a million NOPM in HammerDB
Today I want to discuss some of the performance improvements that Intel has helped with, which have led to MariaDB Server achieving 1 million NOPM (new orders per minute) in the HammerDB TPROC-C test.
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Continue reading “How Intel helps MariaDB become even faster”
Both MariaDB and MySQL have been around a long time now, and there is always a difficult balance between maintaining compatibility whilst also solving security issues that arise. With the latest bugfix releases of MariaDB, we had to break compatibility a little to improve security, but there are workarounds. We figured we should explain the reasons behind it and how to make things as painless as possible for you.
The Problem
The problem we were solving, and for various reasons we had to do it very quickly, is that it is possible to generate a malicious MariaDB dump file which could execute shell commands from the MariaDB client.
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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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