MariaDB in Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. …

MariaDB User Feedback

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak. …

Ornery Oneiric

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. …

Monty Program will be at Percona Live London

Its good to announce that Monty Program will have a presence at Percona Live London (October 24 & 25 2011), and we’re very excited about it. There will be two talks (no tutorials this time around):

  1. Sergei Golubchik will present on Pluggable Authentication in MySQL and MariaDB. I’ve seen Serg give tutorials to this effect, so expect a lot within half an hour!
  2. Colin Charles will present on Why MariaDB? which focuses on what new features are available today in MariaDB and how they benefit users.

Will we see you there?

The 2 year old MariaDB

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). …

MariaDB Crash Course

Ben Forta, the author of MySQL Crash Course and Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, has written what I believe is the first MariaDB-specific book: MariaDB Crash Course. I just received word from Ben that the book is now shipping.

Most MySQL books can, of course, be used to learn almost everything you need to know about using MariaDB. But with all of the features and abilities MariaDB has gained in the MariaDB 5.2 and MariaDB 5.3 releases, it’s nice there is now a book specific to MariaDB. …

MariaDB 5.3.1 beta released!

It has arrived, a little over a month from the last beta release, is MariaDB 5.3.1. It is a bug-fix update and as always the changelog lists everything that has been fixed. The release notes list all the changes present in the 5.3-series.

Many fixes are in the optimizer updates that showed itself in MariaDB 5.3.0-beta, plus backports from the MySQL 5.6 feature preview trees. Microsoft Windows is also important to the MariaDB project so there are plenty of updates for that platform. What are you waiting for, download it now.

Early tests show MariaDB 5.3.0 having a performance speed-up against DBT-3 query set

Posted recently on the maria-developers mailing list, by Igor Babaev, Principal MariaDB developer at Monty Program is some interesting preliminary results for MariaDB 5.3.0 benchmarked against the DBT-3 benchmarking program.

DBT-3 is a benchmark to test a decision support workload, with a suite of business-oriented queries and concurrent data modifications.

Read Igor’s discoveries, which he ran on a laptop with 4 cores (multi-threaded = 8 cores in total), 8GB RAM and SSD on SuSE, and as Igor says, enjoy his numbers. It is a repeatable benchmark with all settings included.