Category Archives: Contributions
An early look at the DuckDB storage engine for MariaDB — columnar, vectorized analytics that live right next to your transactional tables.
The problem
MariaDB’s InnoDB is excellent at what it was built for: transactions. Row-by-row inserts, updates, point lookups, strong consistency. But the moment you ask it to scan tens of millions of rows for a multi-way join with a few aggregations, a row store has to work hard.
The usual answer is to stand up a separate analytical system, then build ETL pipelines to copy data into it.
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Continue reading “DuckDB Storage Engine for MariaDB. When the Sea Lion Learns to Quack.”
Inspired by some recent LinkedIn posts, I decided to take the AI in my own hands and do some stats on the MariaDB and MySQL repositories.
This graph is what I’ve got.
Not only have MariaDB Server distinct contributors surpassed the distinct MySQL Server contributors count! The External MariaDB contributors alone did! *
This is how the Power Of the Community looks like!
- You get to use a more functional, performant and error free MariaDB Server
- You get a say in shaping the future of the MariaDB Server.
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We have a new record average time to process a pull request: 21 days!
Part of my job is following (and trying to improve of course) some key metrics about MariaDB Server pull request processing. As a part of that I compile a nice pull request metric and a graph of it. This is what it looked like for the last month:
There’s a single number that caught my attention: 21.05 ! This is a new record low! That’s how much it takes on average from opening a pull request to closing it for all the requests closed last month!
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Continue reading “A New Pull Request Processing Time Record”
If you ever considered contributing code to the MariaDB server, you should know that this is an intricate process involving multiple steps and multiple actors. To help you see your contributions successfully merged into the MariaDB Server codebase I’ve compiled a comprehensive description of the contribution process itself, the roles involved into it, the sequence of actions and conditions for transition from one to another. There’s even a diagram!
Please go to COMMUNITY_CONTRIBUTIONS.md.
This of course is going to be a moving target! I fully intend to keep the document up to date and enhance it with clarifications and process changes as they happen.
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Continue reading “Documented: The MariaDB Server (Community) Contribution Process”
We are concluding our series related to new data types using the Type_handler framework, with some limitations that are not yet covered by the framework:
- No custom indexing methods. A plugin type cannot introduce a new indexing method.
- No custom hashing. Plugin types can’t provide their own function for hash-based operations. Things like MEMORY table indexes, GROUP BY, and partitioning fall back to the underlying type’s hash.
- No new field attributes. Plugin types cannot define custom attributes beyond the existing ones: length, precision, scale, and GIS SRID.
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Continue reading “Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 5”
This is part 4 of a series related to extending MariaDB with a custom data type using the Type_handler framework.
You can find the previous articles below:
- Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 0 – how to build MariaDB Server
- Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 1 – understanding the framework
- Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 2 – minimal working data type
- Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 3 – data type output transformation
Overriding Existing Types
In the previous examples, our MONEY data type inherits from DOUBLE and then we override some methods.
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Continue reading “Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 4”
In the previous article, we wrote, compiled, and tested our first custom data type for MariaDB using the Type_handler framework.
But currently, aside from allowing the use of its new name (MONEY) and listing it in the metadata, our new data type behaves exactly like a DOUBLE, the class it inherits from.
In this article, we will extend our data type just a bit by transforming the result into a VARCHAR and adding a currency sign to it: the dollar sign ($).
This is the expected result:
MariaDB [test]> …
Continue reading “Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 3”
After having discovered the Type_hander framework and learned how to build MariaDB Server from source, it’s time to code our first data type!
We will create a MariaDB plugin that registers a new MONEY type and instantiates a custom field object.
Our component won’t be exciting, but we want to understand how to use the framework and test it.
We want to prove that
- the plugin loads,
- the server sees the type hander,
- a MONEY column can create a Field_money object.
Everything else comes later.
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Continue reading “Adding a New Data Type to MariaDB with Type_handler – Part 2”