MP Istanbul 2010 T-Shirt Giveaway

We saved three XL-sized t-shirts from our recent all-company meeting in Istanbul. At first we thought it would be a good idea to give away the shirts through a random drawing. But after mulling it around in our minds for a day or two, we thought we should make it a bit more fun, so we decided to have a small quiz (don’t worry, it’s only one easy question).

Before we get to that, here’s a run-down of what we did in Istanbul. Our community and documentation guys (Daniel Bartholomew, Colin Charles, and Kurt von Finck) had the great idea to create an “Istanbul Haber” (aka Istanbul newspaper) for each day of the meeting. …

OpenSQLCamp Boston 2010

OpenSQLCamp Boston 2010 happens 16-17 October 2010, at MIT in Boston (there is an evening social session on Friday the 15th as well). Its organised by MySQL community aficionado Sheeri Cabral, and by looking at the schedule and sponsors, it is going to be one of the most diverse OpenSQLCamp’s by far.

Monty Program is a sponsor, and I (Colin) will be participating on behalf of Monty Program to bring some information about what’s new from the Istanbul company meeting. More of the company certainly wanted to be at the event, but most are going to be spending some quality vacation time in Istanbul, since our all company meeting only ends on the 12th.

Powered by MariaDB badges

There are more sites out there that have their backends running MariaDB. In fact, as we work to get it recommended alongside its upstream provider, it seemed time to have “Powered by MariaDB” logos. Check out the badges that Daniel created. Feel free to copy the images or hotlink them from the server.

As an aside, would any readers be interested in purchasing t-shirts or other MariaDB merchandise? What merchandise should we make, besides just stickers?

Making upgrades from MySQL 5.0 easier

The intention from the start was to make upgrades to newer MySQL versions trivial. We have done a lot of work to keep data formats compatible (both in the .frm files and in the storage engines); when you install a new version of MySQL things should “just work”.

For a long time this was true, until MySQL 5.0 where we had to do some data incompatible changes, like in the way some characters were sorted and how end-of-line blanks were stored in indexes.

To make the upgrade process easy, we created the ‘mysql_upgrade’ program which should detect possible incompatible tables and automatically convert data as needed. …

5.2.2 is around the corner

I’ve just pushed the last batch of changes into 5.2 tree. The most important change was renaming Maria engine to Aria (with old maria* compatibility variables). Other — smaller — changes included adding all plugins to the windows .zip distribution (sphinx and oqgraph too), building mysqld.exe with federatedx, not old federated engine, refactoring of mysql-test-run suite to support pluggable per-suite extensions, print the plugin configuration in the ./configure script, and other even smaller changes. Together with all bug fixes that 5.2 has accumulated over time it made the tree ready for the next release – 5.2.2! …

The “MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development” book is finally published

If you want to know more about MySQL and MariaDB plugins read below. Our (Andrew Hutchings and mine) book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development was just published by Packt. As far as I know it’s the first and the only book completely dedicated to MySQL Plugin API. It covers all existing in 5.1 plugin types, from Daemon to Storage Engines, and does not shun from explaining less known or poorly understood features of the plugin API. It describes newer plugin API extensions too – such as authentication plugins and recent CREATE TABLE extension. …

Mirroring MariaDB

We rely on a network of mirrors to efficiently distribute MariaDB to the world. It would be impossible for us to distribute MariaDB without the assistance of our mirrors. Thank you!

Today we’d like to announce that thanks to the generosity of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, mirroring MariaDB is faster and easier than ever.

If you have some extra hard drive space and spare bandwidth, please consider becoming a mirror. Instructions on how you can become an official MariaDB mirror are on the “Mirroring MariaDB” page in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. …

MariaDB 5.1.50 Released

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.1.50, a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. MariaDB: Community developed, feature enhanced, backward compatible.

For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.50, please see the release notes.

Highlights include MariaDB 5.1.50 based on MySQL 5.1.50, includes XtraDB 5.1.49-12, and have some bug fixes in the Aria storage engine. For finer grained details, please view the changelog.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form for a variety of platforms and is available from the download pages. …