Deep dive into Clang sanitizer testing with MariaDB (Post Event)

Earlier I posted that this presentation was about to happen, and it did! I presented to a keen audience of over 20 people live, and number who watched later (it was in a rather early US time, however attracted a number of attendees from Europe, India, Thailand all the way to east of Australia at UTC+10:30.

Below is the video, and the slide outline is available.

The journey to this presentation began as a request to update our Clang version that we use in Buildbot, MariaDB’s CI system.

What’s After Happily Ever After?

This week, I turn 50 — my golden jubilee, if we’re speaking in royal terms.

Once upon a time, a much younger woman wandered into the magical forest of open source. The creatures were friendly, the quests exciting, and every day promised new adventures. She thought the story would end with “…and they all lived happily ever after.”

But any Queen worth her crown knows — that’s where the real work begins.

Because after the confetti settles and the palace gates close, someone still has to fix the drawbridge, negotiate with neighbouring kingdoms, and explain to the court jester why his “harmless little prank” brought down production.

Do they even test this?!

That’s the question every tester dreads to hear, because it usually means we’ve let something really embarrassing slip into a release.

The real answer is, “Yes, we do,” though that doesn’t offer much comfort if you’re facing issues in production. Still, during quieter moments, people sometimes ask less rhetorically what kind of testing takes place in MariaDB. Let’s dive into that.

A path of a bugfix into a maintenance release

When a pull request (or an internal patch outside the PR system) is pushed into the MariaDB/server repository on Github, it is picked by the MariaDB server CI, Buildbot.

Virtuozzo Becomes Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation — Advancing European Cloud Sovereignty

The MariaDB Foundation is proud to welcome Virtuozzo as a Silver Sponsor, reinforcing a shared commitment to building an open, sovereign, and innovation-driven digital future for Europe.

Virtuozzo is a pioneer in virtualization and cloud infrastructure software, with deep European roots and global reach. Their support of the MariaDB Foundation is not just a sponsorship — it’s a statement of strategic alignment between two organizations shaping the backbone of an independent European technology ecosystem.

This partnership brings together two essential layers of infrastructure — Virtuozzo powering the cloud and MariaDB powering the data.

“I Am Not Building Cadillacs Anymore”

The Ford–Cadillac Parable

In 1902, Henry Ford’s second car company was taken over by investors and renamed Cadillac. The designs were his. The engineering was his. But the brand? That now belonged to someone else.

So Ford walked away and started fresh.

Years later, even as Ford cars became wildly successful, people kept asking:

“Are you the guy who builds Cadillacs?”

To which he had to answer—over and over again:

“No. I’m not building Cadillacs anymore.”

It took years before the public truly grasped the difference.

MariaDB Foundation Welcomes Rumahweb as a Silver Sponsor

We are thrilled to announce that Rumahweb, one of Indonesia’s most trusted and long-standing web hosting providers, has joined the MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor.

Founded in 2002, Rumahweb has built a reputation for reliability, innovation, and a strong commitment to customer support. With a wide range of offerings — including shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, and domain services — Rumahweb empowers individuals, SMEs, and large enterprises alike to succeed in the digital space. Backed by 24/7 professional technical assistance, they have become a pillar of Indonesia’s internet infrastructure.

Per-table unique FOREIGN KEY constraint names – new feature in MariaDB 12.1

For historical reasons, the handling of FOREIGN KEY constraints in MariaDB Server is somewhat peculiar. Unlike CHECK constraints, which are being enforced at the query execution layer for all tables, FOREIGN KEY constraint definitions will simply be ignored unless the underlying storage engine supports them.

The storage engine is not only responsible for enforcing referential integrity between tables, but also storing the constraint definitions. Currently, InnoDB is the only storage engine that supports foreign key constraints, between persistent, non-partitioned tables.

Partitioning is implemented by a storage engine wrapper that makes each partition or subpartition appear as a separate table in the underlying storage engine.

Make JSON DEPTH unlimited – new feature in MariaDB 12.1

At some point, nearly every developer encounters a common challenge: working with deeply nested JSON only to run into an arbitrary depth limit imposed by the database. In our case, that hard cap was set at 32 levels — sufficient for many scenarios but too restrictive for more complex or dynamic data structures. To address this, we decided to remove the limitation entirely.

The database now supports JSON documents and JSON paths with virtually unlimited nesting! This change unlocks the ability to work with more flexible and expressive data models without forcing developers to restructure or flatten their data.