Monty Program & SkySQL: a statement on the serious security vulnerability that was found in MariaDB and MySQL

Over the past few days extensive conversations around a new security vulnerability in MariaDB and MySQL have taken place.

It all started as a chain reaction when Monty Program publicly disclosed information about the flaw they had found and about how to make sure your MariaDB and MySQL installations can be fixed. The initial information got assigned the security vulnerabitlity identifier CVE-2012-2122 and the contents can be seen e.g. here http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/493.

The bug was found two months ago on April 4th.

Before disclosing the information publicly, given the seriousness of this bug and considering the millions of MySQL and MariaDB installations deployed worldwide, Monty Program informed the biggest distributors of MySQL and MariaDB as a precaution. …

MariaDB 5.5 performance on Windows

We haven’t posted any Windows benchmarks for a while, and MariaDB for Windows contains some specific improvements which might not be widely know since we haven’t talked much about them yet. This post is an attempt to fix that. We’ll also share current MySQL 5.5 numbers.

My setup is an 8 core 2 socket server (yes, a little bit dated for today, but it is the best machine I have at my disposal), 10K SAS disks with RAID1. I ran sysbench 0.4 single table / 1,000,000 records. I ran the benchmark over a network, with the number of concurrent clients ranging from 4 to 4096. …

How To Tune MariaDB Write Performance

This article describes how I tuned MariaDB to give the best write throughput with SSD based storage.

When you have a write-heavy application writing into InnoDB, you will probably experience the InnoDB Checkpoint Blues. The effect manifests as stalls – short periods of time where the troughput falls to zero and I/O activity goes crazy. The phenomenon is well known and described i.e. here. More background about checkpointing can be found here.

The XtraDB fork of the InnoDB engine (and heart of Percona Server) contains some patches with the goal to overcome this odd behavior. …

5.5 Series Sysbench OLTP Results

A few days ago MariaDB, MySQL and Percona all three released new versions of the 5.5 server. So I decided it’s time to run sysbench once more and compare the OLTP performance. The test candidates are:

  • MariaDB-5.5.24, using either XtraDB (default) or InnoDB
  • MySQL-5.5.25
  • Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0

For the benchmarks I used our trusty old pitbull machine which has 24 cpu cores, 24G of RAM and a nice RAID-0 composed of 3 SAS SSD.

The benchmark was sysbench-0.5 multi-table OLTP, using 8 tables with total 10G of data. InnoDB buffer pool was 16G, InnoDB log group capacity 4G (the maximum for MySQL). …

MariaDB 5.5.24 released

If you’re not on the announce mailing list (low traffic) or following us on Facebook, you’ve missed the announcement of MariaDB 5.5.24 (release notes, changelog). Highlights include:

  • Includes all changes up to MariaDB 5.3.7 and MySQL 5.5.24
  • We’re providing RPM packages for RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6, as well as a YUM repository
  • Ubuntu 12.04 has been released, so we have “Precise” packages
  • There are now BSD 9 and Mac OS X 10.5 binaries as well

Many new ways to get and use MariaDB, download MariaDB 5.5.24 and let us know how you’re liking it. 

What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. …

Announcing the Explain Analyzer

The explain statement can be an important tool for understanding how a query is being executed and what you can do to make it run better.  Although the output of EXPLAIN is relatively straightforward it can be confusing to inexperienced users or can be mangled by terminal wrapping.

To help with these problems as well as provide a pastebin for MariaDB developers to share explains during development we created The MariaDB/MySQL Explain Analyzer. This tool:

  1. Helps unmangle explains (both vertical and tabular format)
  2. Displays explains in an easy-to-read format.
  3. Highlights and provides explanations for some terms.

MariaDB at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2012

On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. …