Slackware and Arch Linux switch to MariaDB as a default

Two bits of good news for MariaDB users from the distribution standpoint this week:

openSUSE 12.3 released with MariaDB as default

Congratulations to the openSUSE community on a successful release of openSUSE 12.3. A highlight worth mentioning is that MariaDB is now the default as opposed to MySQL. What are you waiting for, download it!

From the features list, here’s an excerpt focusing on MariaDB & MySQL:

openSUSE has moved from MySQL to MariaDB as default. MariaDB was first shipped with openSUSE 11.3 back in 2010. Over the years it proved itself and starting with 12.3 openSUSE is replacing default MySQL implementation with MariaDB. This means that whole distribution is compiled against MariaDB and in ‘M’ in LAMP means MariaDB from now.

MariaDB/MySQL Tokyo Meetup #1

If you’re interested in MariaDB & MySQL and happen to be in Tokyo, do drop by the first ever MariaDB/MySQL Tokyo Meetup #1.

It happens October 16 2012, from 18.00-20.00. It is graciously hosted at K.K.Ashisuto (HQ) Salon Space (2nd floor). We have maps in Japanese and English.

See you there!

Consolidating MariaDB project tools

It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: https://mariadb.org/jira) we can report bugs, have future plans, and also give users a roadmap which is pretty cool. …

What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. …

MariaDB at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2012

On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. …

MariaDB Statistics and Surveys

I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.

I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB). …

The 2 year old MariaDB

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). …