In the first post of this series, I’ve described how the vector index is stored in a table and how it achieves full transactional behavior and ACID properties compatible with the storage engine of the table the user created. But while the table provides persistent storage of the index, it’s in-memory part that gives it the performance. This is how it works.
Distance calculations
This is the most performance sensitive part of the HNSW. According to various estimates, distance calculations account for 80–90% of search time. And this operation time grows linearly with the vector length.
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We are pleased to welcome Datography as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.
Datography focuses on helping organizations understand, map, and manage complex data environments. As data infrastructures grow increasingly distributed across platforms, services, and geographies, having clear visibility into how data flows and where it resides becomes critical for governance, security, and operational efficiency.
This aligns closely with the MariaDB Foundation’s mission to support the adoption of open, transparent, and reliable data infrastructure.
Why This Matters
Modern organizations rarely operate a single database in isolation. Instead, they manage diverse data estates spanning multiple technologies, environments, and jurisdictions.
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Continue reading “Datography Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor”
If you’ve been around the MariaDB community for a while, you can probably feel it already: things are moving in the right direction.
And no, I’m not talking about one vanity metric, one lucky spike, or one noisy social post.
I’m talking about a broader trend.
The latest Adoption Index data shows something I really like to see: not one lucky spike, but multiple signals moving in the right direction at the same time.
Sometimes people want one number.
One chart. One KPI. One neat little story.
But open source projects do not work like that.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Keeps Climbing: Community, Adoption, and Momentum”
We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.0 series. MariaDB 13.0 is a preview rolling release, published on 23 March 2026, and it continues the work started in 12.3 while adding a solid set of entirely new features.
And this one is interesting.
This preview release brings a nice mix of new SQL capabilities, better optimizer insight, richer metadata, and practical engine improvements. Not every feature is flashy, but many of them are exactly the kind of changes that make daily work with MariaDB smoother, clearer, and just a bit more powerful.
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We are pleased to welcome DBaasNow as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.
As the MariaDB ecosystem continues to expand across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, the need for consistent, reliable, and scalable database operations has never been more important. DBaasNow brings a strong focus to this space with its database operations control plane, designed to standardize and automate database lifecycle management across diverse infrastructures.
Simplifying Operations Across Mixed Database Environments
Many organizations today operate MariaDB alongside other database technologies. Managing these environments efficiently is often challenging, particularly in governance, automation, and operational consistency.
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Continue reading “DBaasNow Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor”
It’s easy to be a queen. Why? Because you can always count on your true selfless friends. I learned this already as a young princess. Nothing brightens a ball quite like a comment from one of your most trusted girlfriends:
- “Oh I love how you applied foundation — it’s not particularly aging, and it almost covers your zests.”
- “You are SO brave to wear this dress — I would have worried it makes me look… well… a bit much.”
It’s beautiful. It’s pure. It’s a sign of true friendship and it has nothing to do with the fact that this girlfriend is interested in the same prince
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You might have seen that MariaDB Vector is fast. And is getting faster. But why? How does it achieve that? And why it is said to use mHNSW (modified HNSW) algorithm? What did it modify in the conventional HNSW that all other databases are using? Let’s take it apart and analyze piece by piece.
Introduction into HNSW
This post is not a full description of HNSW, there are many HNSW descriptions online and they are good, better than what I could’ve written. I will only show the basic concepts beyond HNSW, concepts that are crucial for the rest of the post.
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I am starting a new series on what makes MariaDB Server distinct from MySQL, highlighting innovations that make the difference.
MariaDB 12.3 introduces a new binary log implementation that stores binlog events directly in InnoDB-managed tablespaces rather than in separate flat files on disk.
This is an incredible innovation; for a long time, binary logs have been a performance bottleneck. DimK pointed it out several times. [1], [2]
The new binlog design halves the number of fsyncs and improves performance, as Mark Callaghan noted in his blog posts.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Innovation: InnoDB-Based Binary Log”