Announcing the MariaDB Vector Bounty Program!

Today, we are excited to announce a new fund to help give MariaDB Vector a high-quality integration into as many LLM frameworks as possible. This means that you can get rewarded for integrating MariaDB Vector into a known framework! This program will run until the end of February 2025.

How it will work

  1. Pick a framework: You need to pick one of the frameworks from the list curated by Qdrant that you would like to work on adding MariaDB Vector support to.
  2. Contact us: Contact us on the MariaDB Zulip, in the General channel, just create a topic.

MariaDB – the Foundation, the Company, and the Future of the Sea Lion

Did you read the TechCrunch article on MariaDB? “How do you solve a problem like MariaDB? Cozy up to the community, says new CEO“. If not, I suggest you do!

We’re in India 23-25 Oct 2024!

And if you want to know more, and happen to be in India at the end of the month, come and listen to me interviewing MariaDB creator Michael “Monty” Widenius, MariaDB plc’s new CEO Rohit de Souza, and MariaDB plc’s new Chief Product Officer Vikas Mathur. We’ll be at Open Source India on 23-24 Oct 2024 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, and we’re adding a MariaDB ServerFest India on Friday 25 Oct 2024.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024

Another quarter year has gone by, and in the world of MariaDB, it is time for another contributions report. The raw data for this report can be found on GitHub, here.

Server contributions

Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server so far this year.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
MariaDB Plc 29 1262
MariaDB Foundation 6 123
Codership 7 77
Independent 17 57
Amazon 12 50
Arch Linux 1 6
GSoC 3 5
IONOS 1 4
Alibaba 1 3
Rakuten 1 3
HardenedBSD 1 2
OpenBSD 1 2
University of Sydney 1 2
Arm 1 1
Chainguard 1 1
ClearCode 1 1
FreeBSD 1 1
IBM 1 1

MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 8th October 2024

There have been some interesting things to note here.

Announcing the first MariaDB Hackathon – in India!

Update 2024-10-15: The event has been cancelled in favour of something better. Please see the end of this post.

On the 24th – 25th October 2024 we will be hosting our first-ever Hackathon as part of our larger MariaDB Foundation presence around Open Source India.

What is a Hackathon?

If you have never done one before, it is basically a fun and challenging technology event where the goal is to create new things. Attendees are split into small teams of 5-10 people. An open source project is chosen to create and/or improve upon, and you have a day to work on it (and night as well if you really want to).

MariaDB 11.7.0 preview release available

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 11.7.0, a preview of the MariaDB 11.7 series. MariaDB 11.7 will be a rolling release.

MariaDB 11.7.0 introduces numerous new features, in particular

* Functions to generate UUID version 4 and version 7. A contribution by Stefano Petrilli.
* Near-instant binlogging of large transactions (avoid copying into the binary log). A contribution by Song Libing.
* Faster crash recovery where prepared transactions are rolled back asynchronously. A contribution by Song Libing.
* Cost-based choice between subquery optimization strategies in UPDATE and DELETE
* New GIS functions: ST_Validate(), MBRCoveredBy(), ST_Simplify(), ST_GeoHash(), ST_LatFromGeoHash(), ST_LongFromGeoHash(), ST_IsValid(), ST_Collect(). …

MariaDB Foundation assisting multiple vendors

I recently helped two of our sponsors simultaneously, DBS Bank and MariaDB Plc, with a recent issue they were experiencing. This actually helped us add support for an extra cloud vendor. But before I tell the story, I first need to give a bit of background.

S3 Engine History

Back in 2019, we added the S3 engine to MariaDB Server. “S3” stands for “Simple Storage Service”, it was developed by Amazon, and it is pretty much the standard for storing objects (typically files) in the cloud. Almost every cloud vendor has their own object storage with an S3-compatible REST API.

SQL Fiddles updated to MariaDB 11.4

There are a number of SQL Fiddles, web interfaces to databases for testing / learning SQL. Recently we noticed the versions on these falling behind and not presenting users with updates that would deliver the latest MariaDB features and bug fixes.

In reaching out to the people that manage these fiddles we’re pleased to announce that so far, two providers have updated their MariaDB version(s).

PHPize.online / SQLize.online

PHPize.online and SQLize.online are the pet projects of Slava Rozhnev. These have both been updated and now have available MariaDB 11.4, our current long term support version, and also MariaDB 11.5.

Intel improving the performance of MariaDB Vector

As you have probably seen in earlier posts, the preview version of MariaDB Vector is out and ready for you to play with. We have had input from several different places during the development of this feature. This, of course, includes hardware manufacturers such as Intel.

In the background, Intel have been prototyping using AVX512 instructions for dot product and bloom filter. Both of these are functions are part of vector searches. If you haven’t heard of these terms, let me try and break them down.

AVX-512 – 512-bit extensions to the Intel Advanced Vector Extension

The AVX512 instructions themselves are CPU specific instructions that are designed to run calculations on large vectors of numbers simultaneously.