Join the Solstice Run Sat 20 June 2020

My favourite running track is full! Full of newbie runners, young and old. Mostly running alone, sometimes in pairs – but all following social distancing. 

Social distancing can be coupled with emotional closeness. That’s at least what Sauli Niinistö propagates, the President of Finland. In line with these two phenomena – emotional closeness between isolated colleagues, and the boom of running as a source of energy during lockdown – we are launching the Solstice Run

We want to inspire non-runners to run

As initiators, we want to inspire others to start running.

Heads up: Renewing MariaDB Downloads

Time to renew downloads.mariadb.org! We are embarking on a long project. A large part of our user base mainly interacts with us through downloading new versions. Renewing MariaDB Downloads is the biggest-impact project of all of 2020, for that part of our user base.

Projects like this often get launched when external and internal impulses coincide. Our users have asked for a more consistent, simpler user experience. Advanced users would like a programmatic interface (a.k.a. REST API) for part of the functionality. And the current codebase needs refactoring attention, as it has served past its best-before date.

Business As Unusual

MariaDB Foundation faces an unusual world, just like anyone else in these Corona times. Or perhaps, not quite. Here are some ideas for how to cope with a world inhibiting travel and social contact as we know it, from someone who has worked from home for 20 years, with colleagues also working from home.

First, stay upbeat. Humans are social animals, and we live off interactions with others. But Corona just dictates what type of social interactions we can have. It doesn’t inhibit social contact.

Second, stay connected.

Migrating from SQL Server to MariaDB on the MariaDB Knowledge Base

A new series, Migrating from SQL Server to MariaDB is currently being developed on the MariaDB Knowledge Base by Federico Razolli.

Federico is a freelance database consultant, organizer of the London Open Source Database Meetup, author of the book Mastering MariaDB, and well-known member of the MariaDB community.

The series of articles will contain everything needed to migrate from SQL Server, currently including an overview of architecture differences, feature differences, a types comparison, a look at MariaDB transactions and isolation levels, as well as authorization and permissions, and replication, from the perspective of a SQL Server user. …

Five Cities in India

A trip to Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai taught MariaDB Foundation the importance of India. Government and Fintech lead the pack. India has a huge supply of highly educated IT specialists, and their decision power in selecting tools (including databases) is growing. India is moving from a body-shop for Europe and the US towards becoming a hotbed for startups, and for database training and adoption, India has a near-perfect language landscape for the MariaDB Foundation University Program.

MariaDB Server’s continuous integration & testing available to community

How MariaDB Server is tested

MariaDB Foundation is commited to ensuring MariaDB Server has a thriving community of developers and contributors. A software project cannot be maintained without proper tests. mysql-test-run is our standard testing toolkit for MariaDB Server. What it (mostly) does is run queries against one or more servers and compare their output to the expected one. This checks both behaviour and data consistency. The main principle is the server should always return the same data that is put into it.

One problem with this testing method is that it only covers the hosts’ environment. That means that if you are running Debian on x86_64 architecture, you are testing x86_64 architecture on a Debian Linux distribution. …

2019 MariaDB Developers Unconference Shanghai Presentations

The 2019 Shanghai MariaDB Developers Unconference is being hosted by Microsoft Shanghai, from 19 November. Slides will be added to this post as they become available.

Day One

Day Two

Progress on Pull Request Processing

In his blog post “On Contributions, Pride and Cockiness ” in May, MariaDB Foundation CEO Kaj Arnö spoke of a renewed focus on MariaDB Server pull requests. Processing community pull requests in good time is a key part of our mission, but we’d been falling behind, and receiving justifiable criticism. At the time of that article, there were 167 open pull requests, with many open for far too long, and contributors were frustrated.

We set out two end goals:

  • Reduce backlog of open pull requests
  • Motivate contributors to make more contributions

There’s been no noticeable uptick in contributions since then, but we’ve made good progress in reducing the number of open pull requests. …