We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.
MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases. …
Last weekend Vadim from Percona published his MariaDB 5.3.4 benchmark results. As the new benchmark guy at Monty Program I take this oportunity to add some more results of my own.
One question in the comments to Vadim was if it is fair to compare MariaDB-5.3 with MySQL-5.5. Or if this comparison should be done with MySQL-5.1. The answer is: it does not matter much. MySQL-5.5 and MySQL-5.1 show very similar results in the Sysbench OLTP benchmark.
So I created a Sysbench environment pretty much like Vadims and tested the following versions of the MySQL Server:
- MariaDB-5.3.4 – the Monty Program release candidate, both with XtraDB and the InnoDB plugin
- Percona-Server 5.1.61 because it is based on the same XtraDB version as MariaDB-5.3
- Percona-Server 5.5.20 – the current Percona flagship
- MySQL-5.5.20 – the current Oracle flagship
The result:
Indeed MariaDB-5.3.4 scales significantly worse than MySQL-5.5.20. …
Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF7wChx0uzQ
Some notes:
- The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
- As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user.
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The MySQL community has something new on their radar. First up, it looks like MySQL is now part of Oracle Software Security Assurance, and this is something all MySQL users should be happy about. Next, it is worth noting that MySQL is now part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (Oracle CPU), as the MySQL product line has made it into its first Oracle CPU advisory for January 2012.
As part of the MySQL community, CPU’s are new to us — they are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October.
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Continue reading “Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB”
In this primer I will show how to improve the security of your MariaDB installation by using two-step verification and how to use it from your Windows GUI client.
Let’s suppose you have your data in MariaDB, installed, say, on Ubuntu. And your users connect to it to run ad hoc queries, using some sort of a Windows GUI client. You don’t want them to write the access password on post-it notes or have it auto-entered by the client. And you don’t want anyone see the password when one of the salespersons connects to the mother ship from his laptop in the Internet café. …
Continue reading “MariaDB: Improve Security with Two-Step Verification”
Parts of the world are already celebrating Christmas Eve and it’s time to relax and spend time with family and friends. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas this is when there is time for less work. Here are a few words to round off MariaDB’s current state and where it’s heading.
This year culminated in MariaDB 5.3.3, the release candidate of 5.3. This is a significant release that makes years of work available by default in the database server. Earlier releases still required features to be explicitly switched on, but thanks to thorough testing assuring the quality of the new functionality we have now enabled them. …
We have lately been talking about some upcoming features that we feel are important to MariaDB users, because the corresponding ones that will be provided with MySQL will be incompatible with MariaDB and closed source.
We’re happy to announce the following:
- The next version of MariaDB, version 5.2.10 will include an open source PAM Authentication Plugin. MariaDB 5.2.10 is scheduled for release next week.
- A Windows Authentication Plugin is in development and QA currently and will be part of MariaDB 5.2.11, which is scheduled for release before Christmas.
- MariaDB 5.5 will include both of the above plugins and an open source thread pool implementation.
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As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.
Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication method remains a simple username/password combination. …
Continue reading “Writing a MariaDB PAM Authentication Plugin”