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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New MariaDB releases come with regular intervals. Releasing a new version is a balance between new functionality and bugfixes on one side, and stability on the other. How do we get optimum quality for the releases? And what exactly is quality, from the point of view of DBAs and developers that use MariaDB Server?
That’s the setting of our MariaDB Server MiniFest in two weeks.
New MariaDB Releases: The DBA & Developer Experience
This MiniFest is called “mini” for three key reasons:
- It has just one topic
- It is much shorter, less than half a day
- It happens just in one time zone
But it still builds on the pillars of success from our MariaDB Server Fest in Sep 2020:
- It features expert speakers on MariaDB Server
- It has pre-recording, subtitles, and follow-up discussions
- It is interactive, with the speakers “cloned” on Zulip chat
The special sauce
The special sauce for this MiniFest is
- Internal presenters explain the logic of release policies
- External presenters give the candid user perspective
- The desired outcome: improved processes and quality
The conference format
The internal (provider) presentations have a 10+10 minute format.
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Good news for MySQL users wishing to upgrade to MariaDB: MariaDB 10.5.7 onwards understands formerly-incompatible MySQL JSON fields! This blog entry explains how to install and use them.
Introducing MYSQL_JSON plugin
Starting from MariaDB 10.5.7 (commit f6549e), it is possible to upgrade from MySQL 5.7 tables containing JSON by loading the MYSQL_JSON data type plugin.
MariaDB and MySQL JSON formats are not the same. In MySQL, the JSON type is a native type, while in MariaDB JSON is just an alias for LONGTEXT. What this means in practice is that data in JSON format are not compatible with each other.
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The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 10.5.8, MariaDB 10.4.17, MariaDB 10.3.27, and MariaDB 10.2.36, the latest stable releases in their respective series.
Why do we release MariaDB again only a week after the 10.5.7, 10.4.16, etc? What’s the emergency?
The previous, scheduled, set of releases (10.2 and up) included a security related change — MariaDB server became more strict about accepting network packets from the client. It never was particularly trusting, but still there was a loophole in the handling of prepared statements where the server just assumed that the client sends the correct data. …