MariaDB Draft Trademark Policy Available

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in a post that Monty Program was working on a trademark policy for MariaDB, and we hoped to have something available for community review in early 2011.

Well, that draft is ready now. The draft is available in the MariaDB knowledgebase, and we are soliciting public feedback through January 2. During the first week of January any approved edits will be made to make a final version, and that final policy mirrored on mariadb.org and montyprogram.com.

Hopefully the intent of allowing the unhindered development of cool stuff related to MariaDB while protecting the value of the primary brand itself is made clear. …

MariaDB optimization for string related operations

In our upcoming MariaDB 5.3 release Monty optimized the internal string append code for performance. I tested his patch with a plain MariaDB 5.2 vs. a patched MariaDB 5.2 with sql-bench, which showed an overall performance gain around 3%.

The details of the patch Monty describes like this
Patch to optimize string append:

While examining a trace output from a mysql-test-run case, I noticed a
lot of reallocation calls.  This was strange as MariaDB/MySQL was
designed to do so few malloc/realloc as possible.  The system uses was
to first calculate how big buffer you would need and then allocate a
buffer big enough for most usage. …

MariaDB 5.1.53 And 5.2.4 Released

This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.

Speaking of downloads, the 5.2 series has seen a remarkable increase in download totals. Several orders of magnitude, in fact. That’s usually a pretty good sign, so I’ll take it as such. …

MariaDB And Trademark

I’d like to wish Henrik Ingo well now that he has publicly announced his resignation from Monty Program. Henrik, I especially wish you all the best with the new member of your family.

I know you put a lot of effort into your presentation to the Monty Program board regarding transfer of trademark ownership, and you know (and I do not mind saying externally) that I supported transfer to a non-profit designed for such purposes. Our informal, non-inclusive vote in Istanbul aside, I think the company as a whole should put a lot of thought into such matters. …

MariaDB 5.2 is released as stable

I am happy to announce that MariaDB 5.2.3 is now released as a stable release.

During the gamma period we did not receive any serious reports for issues in 5.2, so we are relatively confident that the new code is of decent quality.

You can read about the features of MariaDB 5.2 in my previous blog entry or in the fast growing MariaDB knowledgebase..

What is most interesting about MariaDB 5.2 is that most of the features came from the MariaDB/MySQL community, not from Monty Program Ab!

Without the community it would not have been possible to do a stable release so soon after the last release. …

Segmented key cache performance results for MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma

Recently I tested our new segmented key cache feature for MyISAM in MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma for performance gains. You can check our new features in MariaDB 5.2 in our Ask Monty Knowledge Base

You will also find the details about the segmented key cache feature in our Knowledge Base at:

We wrote a test in LUA for SysBench v0.5 called select_random_points.lua, to figure out the performance gain of splitting the key cache’s global mutex into several mutex under multi user load. …

MP Istanbul 2010 T-Shirt Giveaway: the winners and extension!

And the winners are, …

There was quite a rush for the t-shirts and we have our three winners:

* Antony Curtis http://antbits.blogspot.com/
* Ray Kawalec http://www.traenq.com/
* Patrick Crews http://www.wc220.com/

Next round

Due to your high interest in our Istanbul2010 t-shirts, we are extending our giveaway quiz until November 30th.

Question: What is Maria in MariaDB and how is it connected to My and Max?

Email your answers to “istanbul2010-contest [at] askmonty (dot) o r g” before 30 Nov 2010. Good luck!

By the way, the design on the t-shirts looks like this:

MP Istanbul 2010 T-Shirt Giveaway

We saved three XL-sized t-shirts from our recent all-company meeting in Istanbul. At first we thought it would be a good idea to give away the shirts through a random drawing. But after mulling it around in our minds for a day or two, we thought we should make it a bit more fun, so we decided to have a small quiz (don’t worry, it’s only one easy question).

Before we get to that, here’s a run-down of what we did in Istanbul. Our community and documentation guys (Daniel Bartholomew, Colin Charles, and Kurt von Finck) had the great idea to create an “Istanbul Haber” (aka Istanbul newspaper) for each day of the meeting. …