Announcing MariaDB 5.5.21 Beta

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.21-beta. MariaDB 5.5.21 is the first Beta release in the 5.5 series and follows the initial MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha release. We hope to follow it up soon with Release Candiate and then Stable (GA) 5.5 releases.

MariaDB 5.5.21 beta is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. In this release we have added some extra notable features including an improved thread pool, an updated SphinxSE storage engine for fulltext search, and the ability to selectively skip replication of binlog events. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into subsequent releases. …

Screencast: MariaDB GIS demo

Here’s another MariaDB screencast, this time highlighting some of the GIS functionality in MariaDB.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDm_8L1oyI

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links and notes:

Acknowledgments:

A big thanks to Alexey Botchkov, MariaDB’s GIS guru, for the example data and help with the screencast. …

Announcing MariaDB 5.3.5

Following closely on the heels of the MariaDB 5.3.4-rc release a couple of weeks ago, the MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.5!

MariaDB 5.3.5 is the first stable (GA) release in the 5.3 series. Details and downloads are available from the following links:

(Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. A sources.list generator is available.)

About MariaDB 5.3

The MariaDB 5.3 series introduces many new features, includes MariaDB
5.2, and is based on MariaDB 5.1 & …

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha

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. …

Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4

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. …

Screencast: Installing MariaDB

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.

Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB

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.

MariaDB: Improve Security with Two-Step Verification

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. …