Speaking at the MySQL User Conference 2011

New Year is coming! And it brings us a new MySQL User Conference! As always, me and my colleagues will be attending — we have great talks to offer:

  • Monty is giving a keynote State of MariaDB. Just like the last year, Monty will tell you how we are doing, what we have spent the last year on, what we are working on now.
  • Colin presents A Beginner’s Guide to MariaDB talk. If you have heard of MariaDB, but don’t quite know what it is and why you should care — go and attend his talk.

MariaDB Draft Trademark Policy Available

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in a post that Monty Program was working on a trademark policy for MariaDB, and we hoped to have something available for community review in early 2011.

Well, that draft is ready now. The draft is available in the MariaDB knowledgebase, and we are soliciting public feedback through January 2. During the first week of January any approved edits will be made to make a final version, and that final policy mirrored on mariadb.org and montyprogram.com.

Hopefully the intent of allowing the unhindered development of cool stuff related to MariaDB while protecting the value of the primary brand itself is made clear. …

MariaDB optimization for string related operations

In our upcoming MariaDB 5.3 release Monty optimized the internal string append code for performance. I tested his patch with a plain MariaDB 5.2 vs. a patched MariaDB 5.2 with sql-bench, which showed an overall performance gain around 3%.

The details of the patch Monty describes like this
Patch to optimize string append:

While examining a trace output from a mysql-test-run case, I noticed a
lot of reallocation calls.  This was strange as MariaDB/MySQL was
designed to do so few malloc/realloc as possible.  The system uses was
to first calculate how big buffer you would need and then allocate a
buffer big enough for most usage. …

MariaDB and TokuDB

I was happy to see the announcement yesterday from Tokutek regarding their addition of MariaDB to their list of supported platforms for the TokuDB storage engine.

One particular item in the press release caught my eye: “Our customers are choosing MariaDB more and more frequently for their most demanding database applications.” We’ve added many new features over the past year in our various 5.1 and 5.2 releases, but beyond the new goodies we’ve focused a lot of energy on removing bugs and improving performance. We’ve known for a while that MariaDB is the best version of MySQL out there; …

MariaDB 5.1.53 And 5.2.4 Released

This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.

Speaking of downloads, the 5.2 series has seen a remarkable increase in download totals. Several orders of magnitude, in fact. That’s usually a pretty good sign, so I’ll take it as such. …

MariaDB And Trademark

I’d like to wish Henrik Ingo well now that he has publicly announced his resignation from Monty Program. Henrik, I especially wish you all the best with the new member of your family.

I know you put a lot of effort into your presentation to the Monty Program board regarding transfer of trademark ownership, and you know (and I do not mind saying externally) that I supported transfer to a non-profit designed for such purposes. Our informal, non-inclusive vote in Istanbul aside, I think the company as a whole should put a lot of thought into such matters. …

Recently in MariaDB #2

There has been a lot happening in the MariaDB community recently, and there has been growth. Here are some of the highlights. Thank you to all our current contributors, and to others that want to contribute, shoot community[at]askmonty[dot]org an e-mail.

MariaDB 5.2.3 binaries for Solaris and Debian Sparc

Our Sparc community contributor, Mark, has continued to make popular binaries for Solaris 10 and Debian Sparc. He’s kept up to speed with MariaDB 5.2.3, so please visit him and download the binaries.

MariaDB 5.2.3 on the openSUSE Build Service

Community contributor Michal Hrušecký has packaged MariaDB for openSUSE and its available via the openSUSE build service.

MariaDB 5.1.51 released

Dear MariaDB users,

The development team have been busy bees, and have freshly released MariaDB 5.1.51. MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes and many community patches.

This release of MariaDB 5.1.51 includes MySQL up to version 5.1.51. It also includes XtraDB up to version 5.1.51-12. For more information, do not hesitate to read the release notes, and for more detailed changes, do hop on over to the changelog.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form in a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, CentOS 5, and Solaris x86.