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.

MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform

About Jelastic:

Jelastic is the next generation of Java Platforms as a Service.

Unlike previous cloud platforms, Jelastic:

  • Can run any Java application and so does not require developers to change their code or get locked-into the platform,
  • Can scale any application up and down by automatically adding or removing memory and CPU units depending on the application load,
  • Takes all configuration and management worries away: developers simply specify the application stack and database options they need and Jelastic creates, configures, and maintains the environment for them
  • Supports a wide range of application server stacks including Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, and GlassFish
  • Out of the box, allows users to get a preconfigured instance of MariaDB up and running and available to the application.

MariaDB 5.3.0 Beta Released with Large Number of Features & Additions

Monty blogged about MariaDB 5.3 being released as a beta with 5.3.0. We also have a press release. Download it now and test the beta!

The MariaDB Project today announced the availability of MariaDB 5.3.0 Beta. It includes a large number of features and additions while still remaining backwards compatible to MySQL®.

“There are many optimizer changes which makes this a very interesting release, because people will notice that their queries run faster,” said Rasmus Johansson, COO of Monty Program Ab, a commercial backer of MariaDB. “The optimizer developers say it’s the biggest change to the optimizer in ten years”, he added.

Quick distribution update: openSUSE, Gentoo

If you’re on openSUSE, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest MariaDB release made on 19/07/2011. Previous security fix disabled XtraDB! This is MariaDB 5.1.55.

If you’re using Gentoo, please test MariaDB 5.2 ebuilds in the MySQL overlay. Its current with MariaDB 5.2.7 as well as MariaDB 5.1.55.

MariaDB is at OSCON

The MariaDB Project is at OSCON 2011. We’ve got a booth, and we plan to also have a BoF session: Wednesday 27 July 2011 at room E142 at 8pm.

There will as usual be lots of black vodka (there was some yesterday at the MySQL BoF as well), and we’re going to talk about and celebrate the release of MariaDB 5.3.0 beta.

Come drop by the booth… we clearly have an interesting booth giveaway. And feel free to say hi to Kurt von Finck, Michael “Monty” Widenius, or Colin Charles who will be present, walking around, etc.

Progress Reporting in MariaDB 5.3

There are many new features in MariaDB 5.3. I’m looking forward to many of them, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is Progress Reporting.

It’s a fact of life in the database world that some commands take longer to run than others. Commands like ALTER TABLE, LOAD DATA INFILE, and adding and dropping an index simply take time to run, depending (of course) on your data and schema. I always have hated having to wait for those commands to run with no indication of how much progress has been made or how much is left to do. …