MariaDB 10.8.0 preview releases now available

Following up on our announcement of the new release model, first used in 10.7.0, we are pleased to announce that the MariaDB Server 10.8.0 preview releases are now available.

Maturing MariaDB more quickly

One of the purposes of the new model is to get features into the hands of users more quickly, in a form which supports stability by allowing the new feature to be more easily tested, separate from other new features being developed at the same time.

Candidate features for MariaDB 10.8

The features available in the preview releases, and therefore under consideration for release in 10.8.1, are:

  1. MDEV-4989 mysqlbinlog GTID support
  2. MDEV-10654 Stored Procedures INOUT Parameters
  3. MDEV-11675 Lag free ALTER TABLE in replication
  4. MDEV-13756 Descending indexes
  5. MDEV-14425 InnoDB redo log improvements
  6. MDEV-17554 Auto create partition
  7. MDEV-26519 JSON Histograms
  8. MDEV-26713 Windows – Improved i18n support
  9. MDEV-27106 Spider Storage Engine Improvements
  10. MDEV-27265 Misc.

Tricky Problems? MariaDB debug container

MariaDB does have bugs. Users see them sometimes. Sometimes developers look for a long time at bug reports and code and still cannot see how the situation occurred. Developers during their analysis ask questions like:

  • I wonder if this was already fixed in {not released version}? But how can I ask a user to test that?
  • Can I get the user to get good stack trace that would help understand this better? But users sometimes find this hard.
  • What exact hardware and kernel configuration is this bug occurring on? And how would I reproduce this?

New Service – quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel

During the development of MariaDB, a lot of things are tested. However the most important workload to be tested is the one we don’t have access to, and that is your workload.

As many of you run your own CI, we’d like you to invite you to join the testing of MariaDB. quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel is a container repository using the latest from our main stable branches. By the time any code gets into these branches it has been reviewed and passed our tests. The developers of the change consider it finished, so this is the perfect time to take this code and test it on your workload.

MariaDB Announces New Innovation Release Model

Quarterly release structure delivers new features to the community faster

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – December 9, 2021 – MariaDB Corporation Ab and MariaDB Foundation today announced a new release model for MariaDB Server, by MariaDB Corporation referred to as MariaDB Community Server, centered on the goal of delivering new features and innovation faster to the millions of MariaDB users around the world. Under the new model, new server release series, such as MariaDB 10.7 or 10.8, occur once a quarter, rather than once a year, bringing more opportunities for new features and contributions to be delivered to the MariaDB user base.

Using CONNECT SE to access remote JSON data with demo examples in Docker

CONNECT is a storage engine (SE) plugin used to access external, local or remote data. In this blog we are going to show how to install the CONNECT storage engine in a Docker container and how to share JSON data between containers.

Enabling CONNECT SE plugin in Docker

CONNECT SE needs to be installed within the container in order to use it. To see how to do that please check Installing plugins in the MariaDB Docker Library Container.

Create JSON data on remote server

The most important feature of CONNECT SE to MariaDB is the flexibility to create tables from various data sources, like the same database and other DMBS’s tables or files with different formats.

FOSDEM22 MariaDB devroom committee

We are pleased to announce the FOSDEM22 MariaDB devroom committee.

In February 2022, MariaDB will be hosting its second dedicated devroom at FOSDEM, and the committee have the job of narrowing down the submissions to choose the most interesting final selection for the FOSDEM and MariaDB communities.

Last year the number of submissions far exceeded the available slots, as it had in earlier years when MariaDB participated as part of the joint MySQL, MariaDB and Friends devroom, and we hope not to let the committee off easy this year.

The committee

Sveta Smirnova (Percona)
Oli Sennhauser (FromDual)
Manuel Arostegui (Wikimedia Foundation)
Federico Razzoli (Vettabase)
Daniel Black (MariaDB Foundation)
Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation)

Welcome to everyone, and we’re looking to seeing what you decide on!

CfP for the MariaDB devroom FOSDEM 2022 now open

MariaDB is happy to again be hosting a devroom at FOSDEM 2022. This year’s event will be the second virtual FOSDEM, and the MariaDB devroom will take place on Saturday 5 February 2022. The deadline for submissions is very soon, 21 December 2021.

FOSDEM is one of the highlights of the calendar, aimed at free and open-source developers, and is free to attend, with no registration necessary.

Engineering and DBA-related topics such as:

  • best practices
  • migrating to MariaDB
  • MariaDB features
  • optimising on particular hardware

are particularly welcome, but the committee (being announced soon) will consider any submissions of interest to the broader MariaDB community.

Server MiniFest Wed 10 Dec 2021: From the Frontlines

Join our next Server MiniFest, to get the latest news from the MariaDB Server frontlines – in a fresh format inspired by Not the Nine O’Clock News.

Not the Nine O’Clock News?

We may not be as funny as the famous BBC2 sketch comedy aired 1979-82. Let me correct myself: We don’t even aspire to be funny. But we do want to be interesting to follow, and make it easy for you to keep watching – not switching off the MariaDB channel for something else.

And we do that by replicating the fast tempo of the comedy role model.