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.

MariaDB Server is “main” by default

We recently had a public vote on whether “main” or a version branch should be the default. The results in favour of “main” were very clear. It has been just over a month, but behind the scenes we have been laying the groundwork for this to happen.

We think we are as ready as we can be, so with the opening of development for 11.7, we have switched to “main” as the default branch for MariaDB Server. This means that all new feature development should now target the “main” branch when contributing to MariaDB Server.

MariaDB ServerFest Berlin 17 Sep 2024

Come join us in Berlin, on Tue 17 Sep 2024! It’s time for our next MariaDB Server Fest, which we invite you to enjoy in person or virtually.

MariaDB Server Fests are the events where MariaDB Foundation and friends celebrate and share the latest new happenings in the world of MariaDB Server. And Berlin is a great place to be – to work in, to travel to, to meet in.

Welcome to Berlin!

The physical event is hosted by MariaDB Foundation’s valued sponsor IONOS, on Revaler Straße 30 in the vibrant and trendy Friedrichshain area of Berlin.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team

Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector

Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.