On the last day of the year, let me share a few thoughts in hindsight on a year that didn’t turn out as anyone expected. The outcome: Not everyone was as lucky as MariaDB Foundation. The pandemic takes longer than expected, and mixes the deck of winners and losers. Sure, most of us lose, a lot. But the forced break can provide lessons for a better post-pandemic life (and business).
Picture: Sanna Marin, PM of Finland, CC BY 4.0 Laura Kotila/Statsrådets kansli 2019 via Wikimedia Commons
Two early pandemic blog entries in March
Background: In March this year (which sometimes feels like yesterday, sometimes like ages ago), I wrote two blog entries about the strange situation caused by the Corona pandemic.
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At MariaDB Foundation, we have many reasons to be thankful towards all of those who have helped us during 2020.
A few sample contributions
We have recently expressed our gratitude towards contributors in our ecosystem, in 2020. Daniel Black explicitly thanked Tencent for their contributions, and Vicentiu Ciorbaru for the ARM related contributions.
On the same note, Intel has given us access to hardware and software to enable builds using Intel compilers, but more on that once we can release these new builds.
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2020 has seen quite a few developments with the ARM architecture. For MariaDB things are no different. First we have expanded our testing infrastructure to cover more Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RedHat) on ARM and we are now building packages for all of them. The next MariaDB release will include additional binary tarballs for ARM distributions, in addition to the already existing RPM and DEB packages.
All this could not be accomplished without the help of Huawei, who have donated several ARM builders to our effort. We strongly believe that only by testing on as many different platforms as possible, with as many different compilers as possible we can guarantee MariaDB’s performance and stability.
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In the name of the MariaDB Foundation, I would like to thank Tencent for their significant contributions to the MariaDB Server in 2020. The permission to, and encouragement of, Tencent staff to contribute towards MariaDB shows a superior and practical understanding of the value proposition of open source in delivering value to everyone at the same time as reducing software maintenance costs.
About Tencent’s DB Kernel Team
Tencent has a cloud native database kernel R&D team, focusing on database kernel optimisation and architecture evolution. The team is experienced (over ten years of database R&D experience) and serves hundreds of thousands of enterprise users.
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We are pleased to announce the FOSDEM21 MariaDB devroom committee.
In February 2021, MariaDB will for the first time be hosting a dedicated devroom at FOSDEM, and the committee are tasked with narrowing down the submitted presentations to choose the most interesting final selection for the FOSDEM and MariaDB communities.
In past years, as part of the joint MySQL, MariaDB and Friends devroom, the number of submissions far exceeded the available slots, and we look forward to burdening the committee with a similar problem this year.
The committee
Aurélien Lequoy (68koncept)
Colin Charles
Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation)
Manuel Arostegui (Wikimedia Foundation)
Sveta Smirnova (Percona)
Vicențiu Ciorbaru (MariaDB Foundation)
Welcome to everyone, and we can’t wait to see what you decide on!
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Done! Our first MariaDB Server MiniFest is over. A smaller version of our MariaDB Server Fest format, the first MiniFest was about the MariaDB Server Release Policy.
Where to find the recordings
Should you have missed the party, we have recorded the 3:18:45 hours of Best Bits for you, available directly on https://mariadb.org/minifest2020/. The sessions are also available individually, as linked below.
Presentations by MariaDB
We started off by three presentations by MariaDB:
- On Building MariaDB, by Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation), with a follow-up interview by Vicentiu Ciorbaru and Vlad Bogolin (both MariaDB Foundation)
- On Merging MariaDB (exact title: Ensuring Build Quality in MariaDB) by Oleksandr “Sanja” Byelkin (MariaDB Corporation), with a follow-up interview by Vicentiu Ciorbaru
- On Security by Sergei Golubchik (MariaDB Corporation and Foundation), with a follow-up interview by Ian Gilfillan (MariaDB Foundation)
The User View
We continued with three presentations by users:
- From a Linux Distribution perspective, by Otto Kekäläinen of Debian, with a follow-up interview by Daniel Black (MariaDB Foundation)
- From a Microsoft perspective, by Sunil Kamath of MSFT, as interviewed by Kaj Arnö (MariaDB Foundation)
- From a Fintech perspective, by Kamalakannan Annathurai of DBS Bank (one of Asia’s biggest banks, in Singapore), as interviewed by Kaj Arnö (MariaDB Foundation)
The concluding Panel
For the concluding Panel on the MariaDB Release Policy, we had asked all speakers and interviewers to be present, which proved challenging – given timezones spanning from Canberra over Singapore across EMEA to the Americas.
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Earlier this week we were happy to announce that MariaDB will have its own devroom at FOSDEM21, taking place on 6 February 2021, and now the CfP is open.
FOSDEM is free to attend, and no registration is necessary. It’s aimed at free and open-source developers, so engineering and DBA-related topics such as:
- best practices
- migrating to MariaDB
- MariaDB features
- optimising on particular hardware
are all welcome. Submissions that miss the mark, such as marketing talks, are not welcome.
We are expecting far more submissions than we can accommodate, so we are looking for 20 minute talks (with an extra 5m for questions) to accommodate as many high-quality speakers as possible.
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Great news! MariaDB got its own DevRoom at FOSDEM 6-7 Feb 2021. Usually FOSDEM happens in Brussels, but nobody is surprised that it is virtual this year.
What FOSDEM is
FOSDEM is the biggest Free and Open Source Developers Meeting worldwide. I am sure it remains so in these pandemic times. While I will miss all the many social f2f encounters at FOSDEM, I am looking forward to meeting people virtually.
Separating MariaDB from MySQL
For MariaDB Foundation, this is no small challenge. We will have to establish a Program Committee of our own, when we have so far cohabitated with MySQL.
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