Category: Community
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Why contribute? Scratch your own itch!
Scratch you own itch, and help others while at it!
Why do people contribute to Open Source projects?
The question is as old as Open Source and its predecessor Free Software: Why do people contribute? We re-asked the oldie-but-goodie, and got results that confirm the old adage about scratching your own itch.
Fixing work or personal needs
The most popular answer? Fixing work or personal needs. It got 44 %, nearly half the votes. You simply need to get the […]
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“Amen” statement for committing transactions
Every once in a while a truly inspiring contribution comes to us at MariaDB. Today’s timely contribution was from Sigma, and their inspiring contribution was in pull request 3937 which adds the AMEN statement for committing transactions. The need for harmonizing cultural norms with SQL standards is largely under explored aspect of engineering and here seems to be a good a place to start as any.
As described:
This contribution was complete with working test cases and followed our template, […]
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The Accidental Queen of the Database Dominion – Month one
Exactly one month ago, I found myself stepping into the role of CEO at MariaDB Foundation. It was a bit like being handed the keys to a beloved old ship and being told, “Don’t worry, it mostly steers itself… unless there’s a storm. Or a kraken. Or a GitHub issue.”
As someone whose surname gives away a bit of context, it’s both an honor and a deeply personal journey to be entrusted with stewarding this next chapter. I used to […]
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Last chance to apply to AI RAG Hackathon
The ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon is nearing its deadline on Monday (by end of March).
We have several cool submissions so far. One is about combining the Knowledge Graph and LLMs, using MariaDB Vector Nearest Neighbour Search. Another one is about an “advanced context diff”, identifying the differences between two text corpuses based not on their literal wording, but on their content.
All of the current submissions are in the Innovation track. We would particularly like […]
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A Conversation with Michal Schorm: MariaDB in Red Hat and Fedora
In a recent conversation, I had the pleasure of speaking with Michal Schorm, the maintainer of MariaDB packages for Red Hat and Fedora – and newly elected Observer on the MariaDB Foundation Board. Our discussion covered his role, the current state of MariaDB in these distributions, and ideas for future improvements.
The Role of a MariaDB Package Maintainer
Michal is responsible for ensuring that the MariaDB source code is compiled and made available as installable packages for Fedora, CentOS Stream, […]
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Give MariaDB Jira votes and comments
MariaDB has had a voting feature in its issue tracker Jira since the dawn of time, but it hasn’t got much active attention. Despite that, there are now many Jira community items that have collected a fair amount of votes over the years.
Many items are now in limbo—not on the MariaDB road map, but not rejected either. We would like to better understand how to act on these.
More votes, and preferably more detailed comments on syntax and desired […]
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MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January 2025
Here comes the Q4 2024 contributions report. The raw data which contains also statistics until today can be found on GitHub, here.
Server contributions
Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server during 2024.
We can see some new names compared to the Q3 2024 report, with contributions from CloudLinux, NetBSD and Workato.
And now, compared to last year, we can see a uptick in number of […]
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On the results from the replication poll
Here are the results of a recent poll on LinkedIn and mariadb.org about the popularity of a few of the major replication features (I aggregated the results from the two sites):
What is your favorite MariaDB replication feature?
I want to share some reasons why the poll results match my own thoughts on the relative importance of these features:
1. Parallel replication
Parallel replication brings a much needed performance boost to replication. This is not only useful for the big […]