Redirecting Downloaders to Knowledge Base

At the end of the download process for MariaDB Server from downloads.mariadb.org, downloaders will from now on be redirected to a MariaDB Knowledge Base page with further information related to how to work with the MariaDB Server release just downloaded.

This is meant to be helpful for the downloader, both when getting started with MariaDB in general, and with that specific release in particular.

The decision to redirect downloaders to a site run by the MariaDB Corporation needs special care. The MariaDB Foundation board voted on the issue, with the board members who work for the MariaDB Corporation abstaining from the vote. …

Debian 10 released with MariaDB 10.3

The Debian project announced their 15th release, code name Buster, on July 6th 2019. Debian 10 ships with MariaDB 10.3 and Galera. There is no separate MariaDB Connector C package, but instead MariaDB 10.3 includes MariaDB Connector C 3.0. Like most other popular Linux distributions, Debian prefers MariaDB over the Oracle owned alternative and this is now the second major release of Debian that only ships with MariaDB, and no MySQL at all. Anybody attempting to run apt install mysql-server will end up with MariaDB server instead and any upgrades from older MySQL versions to new MariaDB versions happen seamlessly, just like users have learnt to expect from apt. …

On Contributions, Pride and Cockiness

At MariaDB Foundation, we are proud of MariaDB Server getting plenty of contributions. But we don’t want to get cocky, so here is an update about where we stand, and what we want to make happen.

First, we have shown our contribution pride in several places. On 15 February 2019, I tweeted

Repeating: On code contributions, #MariaDB beats #MySQL 1009 to 247: We have over a thousand (1009) closed pull requests on GitHub (and 179 open), MySQL has 247 closed (1 open).

In our Annual Report 2018, we spent several pages, talking about pull requests and patches, showing code contribution statistics. …

MariaDB Applying to Participate in Google Season of Docs

Google has announced the first Google Season of Docs (GSDocs), the technical writer equivalent to Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

MariaDB has participated in GSoC every year since 2013. That year saw successful projects to implement Roles and enhanced Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in MariaDB 10.0, and there have been numerous successful contributions since then. One of the students involved at the start, Vicențiu Ciorbaru, now works for the MariaDB Foundation, has been involved in administrating and mentoring GSoC ever since, and is also my co-administrator as we apply for Google Season of Docs.

This is the first year for GSDocs, and the intent is to “bring open source and technical writer communities together, to the benefit of both, raising the awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing”. …

2019 MariaDB Developers Unconference New York Presentations

The 2019 New York MariaDB Developers UnConference was hosted by Hudson River Trading, on February 23 and February 24.

Below are a list of the sessions with links to slides where available (some were discussions with no slides). This post will be updated as slides/video become available.

Day One

  • State of the Infra (Teodor Ionita)
  • The Path of the Query (Sergei Golubchik)
  • How to write your first patch (Anel Husaković) – slides
  • How to write a simple plugin for MariaDB ((Vicențiu Ciorbaru)
  • GSoC Projects and what can we do better (Vicențiu Ciorbaru) – slides
  • ALTER TABLE improvements in MariaDB 10.4 (Marko) – slides
  • Account Locking and Password Expiration (Robert Bîndar) – slides
  • Buildbot gatekeeping and staging on main repo (Teodor Ionita)
  • Debian/Ubuntu debug and packaging overview (Faustin) – slides

Day Two

  • MyRocks: recent feature add-ons (Yoshinori Matsunobu)
  • Query optimizer in MariaDB 10.4 (Sergei Petrunia) – slides
  • Shutdown refactoring in 10.4 (Sergey Vojtovich)
  • Lessons for the Optimizer from TPC-DS Benchmark run (Sergei Petrunia) – slides
  • Static, dynamic code security checks & fuzzing (Teodor Ionita)
  • The open source roadmap of MariaDB.com in 2019 (Rasmus Johansson)
  • XtraBackup at Alibaba Cloud (Fungo Wang) – slides
  • Columnstore: significant changes and future projects (Roman Nozdrin)
  • Alibaba plan to open source Double-Sync Replication/MySQL-Raft Replication and latest Flashback improvements (Lixun Peng)
  • MariaDB ColumnStore Scalability and Transactions (Sasha V) – slides
  • Backup in MariaDB (Monty Widenius)

The Story of our Sea Lion

Why a sea lion? That’s a question we get every now and then, most recently at FOSDEM.

Here is the story:

Our Founder Monty likes animals in the sea. For MySQL, he picked a dolphin, after swimming with them in the Florida Keys. For the MariaDB sea lion, there was a similar encounter.

It happened when Monty and his older daughter My were snorkeling on one of the islands in the Galapagos. Something big, brown and fast suddenly appeared at an arm’s distance, laughing in their faces.

FOSDEM Reflections / MySQL – MariaDB DevRoom

What a great place for informal interactions, strengthening the network, and hearing the latest news from the grapevine! Last weekend 1.-3. Feb 2019, over 8000 developers met in Brussels for FOSDEM 2019.

For the overall atmosphere, take a look at this 1:05 long video by Sofia Ek.

MariaDB Foundation was present with six staff people (Ian Gilfillan, Vicențiu Ciorbaru, Teodor Ionita, Robert Bîndar, Zak Greant and myself) and two board members (Eric Herman from Booking.com and Serg Golubchik from MariaDB Corporation).

Easier licensing of MCAs for MariaDB contributors

Software licensing is a difficult subject that we don’t usually want to think about. It can be confusing and frustrating trying to work out whether different licenses are compatible, and problems like dual-licensing make it even harder. We all just want to write great code, not worry about licenses!

Until now, contributors who provide improvements and bug fixes to MariaDB have been asked to declare their license choice every time they make a contribution. For new contributors, or those who just want to submit a very small fix, this can be a complicated extra step they weren’t expecting. For regular contributors, it’s extra work for every single pull request. …