SQL Fiddles updated to MariaDB 11.4

There are a number of SQL Fiddles, web interfaces to databases for testing / learning SQL. Recently we noticed the versions on these falling behind and not presenting users with updates that would deliver the latest MariaDB features and bug fixes.

In reaching out to the people that manage these fiddles we’re pleased to announce that so far, two providers have updated their MariaDB version(s).

PHPize.online / SQLize.online

PHPize.online and SQLize.online are the pet projects of Slava Rozhnev. These have both been updated and now have available MariaDB 11.4, our current long term support version, and also MariaDB 11.5.

MariaDB ServerFest Berlin 17 Sep 2024

Come join us in Berlin, on Tue 17 Sep 2024! It’s time for our next MariaDB Server Fest, which we invite you to enjoy in person or virtually.

MariaDB Server Fests are the events where MariaDB Foundation and friends celebrate and share the latest new happenings in the world of MariaDB Server. And Berlin is a great place to be – to work in, to travel to, to meet in.

Welcome to Berlin!

The physical event is hosted by MariaDB Foundation’s valued sponsor IONOS, on Revaler Straße 30 in the vibrant and trendy Friedrichshain area of Berlin.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team

Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector

Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.

MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main”

On the 3rd of July, two weeks ago, I created a poll to ask about the future of feature development branches in MariaDB Server. Specifically, whether we should switch to a rolling model which is more familiar to users of services such as GitHub.

The votes we received gave a very clear result. Today I will share the conclusions we drew, as well as setting expectations for what will happen next.

Recap: what is this “main” branch all about?

In a rolling model, there is one main branch of the tree that all the feature commits go into (typically called “main”), and this is then forked when it is time to prepare a major release.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, July 2024

We are half way through the year! Where has the time gone?! This means that is time to talk contributions statistics. The raw data used for this blog post can be found on the metrics GitHub repo.

Server contributions so far

The following table contains the basic contribution stats for MariaDB Server in 2024 so far. We have contributions from almost twice as many non-MariaDB organisations as last quarter, which is fantastic to see. The more varied our contribution sources, the better.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
MariaDB Plc 29 923
MariaDB Foundation 6 64
Codership 6 48
Independent 13 41
Amazon 11 28
Arch Linux 1 6
GSoC 2 4
Alibaba 1 2
OpenBSD 1 2
University of Sydney 1 2
ARM 1 1
FreeBSD 1 1
IBM 1 1
Chainguard 1 1

MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 2nd July 2024

Just like last time, we can almost do a like-for-like 2023 Q2 and 2024 Q2 comparison.

MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Have your say

Many countries in the world right now are hosting elections, in fact, my own country’s election is tomorrow. MariaDB Foundation is also asking for you to make one more vote on our own kind of referendum.

We have recently had a request by a member of the community to change how we use GitHub, in a way that, in-theory, will make things easier for community contributors. I’ll explain the current situation, the proposal and then the poll.

Current situation

At the moment, if you want to develop a new feature for MariaDB Server, it needs to be developed against the latest version branch, which is the default branch when you view on GitHub.

Improving MariaDB support in open source projects

As part of MariaDB’s efforts in Adoption, we have been working on support of MariaDB in open source projects. 

The open source projects we have been looking at range from well known, ready to use projects like WordPress or MediaWiki (that Wikipedia runs on), to under-the-hood solutions like ORMs that connect software with databases for countless other open source and private projects.

MariaDB is the de facto standard that many projects and users are running. As MariaDB diverges, matures and develops on its own path from MySQL, especially in later versions, it’s not enough to shrug off compatibility questions with “MariaDB is a drop-in MySQL replacement – everybody knows that”.

How Intel helps MariaDB become even faster

There are many forums in the past couple of years where I have talked about how non-code contributions are just as important to MariaDB Server and us at the MariaDB Foundation as the code contributions I typically help with. I’ve also highlighted in the past how Intel have provided some fantastic non-code contributions. They assist us by detecting performance issues on their new and future platforms, as well guidance in finding the root cause of these issues.

The outcome: Over a million NOPM in HammerDB

Today I want to discuss some of the performance improvements that Intel has helped with, which have led to MariaDB Server achieving 1 million NOPM (new orders per minute) in the HammerDB TPROC-C test.