MariaDB & IONOS: Improving performance for hosting

The MariaDB Foundation values our partnerships with our sponsors. Our partnership with IONOS allows us to get insight into how MariaDB Server is used and the direction it should take. As well as generally improving MariaDB Server in many different ways.

IONOS story

At CloudFest 2023, one of the first meetings we had was with Stefan Erkeling from IONOS. It was a very good meeting and it was great to see how much IONOS values our partnership. Stefan indicated in the meeting that there was a performance issue they were hitting and some advice was needed.

MariaDB Health Checks in WordPress

In a previous blog post, I gave an overview of the CloudFest Hackathon. At this event my team created a plugin for WordPress which added additional health checks for MariaDB. Since the Hackathon we have managed to get this plugin into the official WordPress plugin repository and are working on improving it.

About the plugin

The plugin is designed in a modular way with multiple parts that can be useful for WordPress administrators. The following is a breakdown of all the parts currently in the plugin.

Metrics

One of the core features is gathering metrics about the queries executed.

MariaDB Coding Standards

Coding standards are often as hotly debated as vim vs emacs and other developer arguments. Viewers of the show Silicon Valley will all know the “tabs vs spaces” scene and how passionate people can be about it. Whilst I do personally have a preference (I’m not sharing it here), I feel it is much more important that people stick to one standard for a code base.

Standards Story

Several months ago a new community developer for MariaDB Server sent me a message asking where to find our coding standards document. After a bit of searching I realised we did not have one, and if we want to onboard new developers we definitely should have one.

Code of Conduct Update

Back in December, we asked for your feedback on implementing a code of conduct in the MariaDB Server community. We have seen some great feedback and observations from this and today we are have published version 1.0 of our code of conduct.

Feedback

The feedback we have received has been generally positive both when it comes to implementing a code of conduct in general, and to the content of the text.

That said, it was suggested by Brian Andrus that we better define “inflammatory language”; this is something we actually discussed internally prior to the draft content.

MariaDB Foundation at CloudFest Hackathon

On the 18th – 20th of March there was a Hackathon before the CloudFest conference. This had 11 projects and well over 100 participants every team producing something great. In fact, thanks to the Hackathon, there is a new MariaDB Health Checks plugin available for WordPress.

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MariaDB Contribution Statistics, March 2023

Due to a catalogue of issues our previous quarterly update for developer metrics was not published. This time, however, we have made quite a few changes. In this post, we will summarise 2022 and what has happened in the first couple of months of 2023. All the data for this blog post can be found in CSV format in the release section of the MariaDB Metrics repository, along with everything you need to generate the metrics yourself.

Changes to metrics gathering

For the main commit metrics, we use a tool called “GitDM” or Git Data Miner which was developed for the git kernel trees to group commits by people and organisations.

Google Summer of Code 2023

The Google Summer of Code is a fantastic program that pairs new contributors up with mentors and pays them to work on open source projects.

MariaDB has been part of Google Summer of Code for 10 years and we are happy to announce that we are officially part of the program this year, too!

Traditionally, GSoC has only been open to university students, but now it is available to anyone! I’m a big fan of this, because talented people who do not have the opportunity to go to university can get involved. It also benefits those who are working towards a change into a career in software development.