Community contributions to MariaDB

One of the goals of the MariaDB Foundation is to help new contributors understand the source code and to lower the barrier for new participants. One way to measure this is to look at the number of pull requests received and accepted, as these mostly reflect community contributions. The figures below are for the main server only, not any of the connectors or tools hosted on the Foundation’s GitHub account, and for the period 1 January to 1 July 2017.

Number of GitHub pull requests received: 126 (+113% Year-on-Year)
Number of pull requests reviewed: 102 (+76% YoY)
Number of contributors: 28 (+22% YoY)
Number of reviewers: 13 (+44% YoY)

By comparison, here are the equivalent figures for MySQL:
Number of GitHub pull requests received: 35 (-10% Year-on-Year)
Number of contributors: 19 (+27% YoY)

Although the MariaDB codebase is large and complex, we’re happy to see that there have been some interesting and important contributions from the community. …

A few interesting findings on MariaDB and MySQL scalability, multi-table OLTP RO

It’s been almost a year since I benchmarked MariaDB and MySQL on our good old 4 CPU / 32 Cores / 64 Threads Sandy Bridge server. There seem to be a few interesting things happened since that time.

  • MySQL 5.6.23 peak throughput dropped by ~8% compared to 5.6.14. Looks like this regression appeared in MySQL 5.6.21.
  • 10.0.18 (git snapshot) peak threads increased by ~20% compared to 10.0.9 and reached parity with 5.6.23 (not with 5.6.20 though).
  • 10.1.4 (git snapshot) and 5.7.5 are the champions (though 10.1.4 was usually 1-5% faster). Both have similar peaks @ 64 threads.