A few months ago, I wrote about my first experiments with TideSQL, the MariaDB storage engine powered by TidesDB.
At that time, getting started meant building the TidesDB library, adding the TideSQL sources to the MariaDB source tree, compiling everything, installing the plugin and finally playing with:
CREATE TABLE my_table (…) ENGINE=TIDESDB;
It worked, and I liked what I saw.
But things are moving fast.
TideSQL 5.0.0 is now available, based on TidesDB 10, and I think it is time to have another look at the project.
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Continue reading “TideSQL 5 and MariaDB: the Tides Are Moving Fast”
At Percona Live Amsterdam I caught up with Sveta Smirnova, a world-renowned MySQL expert, author of “MySQL Troubleshooting” and “MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition”, and a frequent speaker at events from Oracle OpenWorld and FOSDEM to HighLoad. After decades as a support engineer, she now works as Principal Support Engineering Coordinator at Percona, where she owns the bug prioritization process, develops tools for Percona’s services teams, and maintains Percona Toolkit. We talked about how AI has changed support work, what makes a “small” bug a big one, and why she recommends motorbikes for the engineering mind.
The easy questions are gone
Ask Sveta what support has in common with 2005 and the answer is simple: people need help, and they come to support. …
Last week I spent a few days in Amsterdam at Percona Live. It was the first Percona Live in Europe since before the pandemic, and you could feel it in the room: a slightly disbelieving happiness at simply being together again. Peter Zaitsev put it well when we sat down afterwards — nobody was quite sure what to expect, and it turned out to be a great event precisely because everyone had missed this.
I have been around since the early days of MySQL, long enough to have watched a good many people come and go.
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Continue reading “The database world grew up — notes from Percona Live Amsterdam”
MariaDB Server 13.0 is now Stable!
The 13.0 series started its journey in March 2026 with the Preview. It then progressed through the Release Candidate phase and is now ready for general use as MariaDB’s latest Stable rolling release.
This is not a long-term support release, which means that an upgrade is relevant for you in the specific scenario that you want to try one of the new features described below. In a test or production environment. But this is not an LTS.
13.0.2, Stable, is an important milestone.
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Magento normally uses InnoDB for orders, order items, invoices, and other transactional data. However, analytical reports have another workload. I wanted to check whether DuckDB can improve a real Magento report without replacing the operational database.
For this experiment, I generated one million Magento orders and two million order items. Then I executed two complete Magento Orders Report queries in three storage configurations.
Short result
- 1,000,000 orders
- 2,000,000 order items
- 18.464 seconds on InnoDB
- 8.267 seconds with orders on DuckDB
- 0.292 seconds with orders and items on DuckDB
- 63.2× measured improvement for this dataset and report
Why I started this experiment
The Magento database has a mostly transactional workload.
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Continue reading “Trying DuckDB for Magento Analytics: An Experiment with One Million Orders”
The MariaDB Adoption Index is up 126% in a year. More people are downloading MariaDB, more people are contributing to it, and more projects are building on it than at any point since we started measuring.
At the same time, the numbers show something else: the way people acquire and discover MariaDB is changing. Some of our older metrics are falling – not because MariaDB is, but because the channels they measure are.
The index combines 24 metrics – downloads, contributors, community, social – into one monthly number, baseline January 2024. Background in the original post.
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MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has renewed its Diamond sponsorship for a fourth consecutive year.
AWS became the Foundation’s first Diamond sponsor in 2023, building on years of technical engagement with MariaDB Server and its community. Since then, the relationship has developed into a sustained collaboration supporting the openness, adoption, and long-term continuity of MariaDB Server.
AWS engineers contribute code and technical expertise to MariaDB Server, and ongoing dialogue between AWS and the Foundation has strengthened communication around development priorities, upcoming releases, and the needs of organizations running MariaDB at scale.
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PAM, Pluggable Authentication Modules, originated in Solaris and became common place in all Linux, BSDs, and AIX, HP-UX and macOS. MariaDB has had PAM support as an option since MariaDB 5.2.10 becoming stable in 10.0.11. So if this is all old and boring why reconsider it? The environment in which Linux operates with PAM has changed in the last 15 years.
MariaDB’s PAM plugin version 1 (as its become known) has a restriction, because the pam module loaded was loaded into the mariadbd executable, it was subject to the restricted permissions, normally just the user, that mariadbd runs.
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