The AskMonty Knowledge Base – Open for editing

Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. …

MariaDB in FreeBSD ports tree

You can now find MariaDB 5.2 in your ports tree in FreeBSD. Check out ports/databases/mariadb. Its currently at MariaDB 5.2.4 and the package maintainer will continue updating it as new releases are made. Naturally the documentation in the Knowledgebase has been updated to reflect this.

SQL-99 Complete, Really

You can now enjoy  SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer aka. “The Definitive Door Stopper” online in our Knowledgebase at http://kb.askmonty.org/v/sql-99-complete-really.

Thanks to our technical writer and system administrator at Monty Program Ab Daniel Bartholomew we now have a complete description of the SQL-99 standard for syntax, data structures, and retrieval processes of SQL databases. As an example-based reference manual it includes all of the CLI functions, information, schema tables, and status codes.

Please make sure to check out our commenting system. You can add your comments for every section of the book. …

MariaDB optimization for string related operations

In our upcoming MariaDB 5.3 release Monty optimized the internal string append code for performance. I tested his patch with a plain MariaDB 5.2 vs. a patched MariaDB 5.2 with sql-bench, which showed an overall performance gain around 3%.

The details of the patch Monty describes like this
Patch to optimize string append:

While examining a trace output from a mysql-test-run case, I noticed a
lot of reallocation calls.  This was strange as MariaDB/MySQL was
designed to do so few malloc/realloc as possible.  The system uses was
to first calculate how big buffer you would need and then allocate a
buffer big enough for most usage. …

MariaDB And Trademark

I’d like to wish Henrik Ingo well now that he has publicly announced his resignation from Monty Program. Henrik, I especially wish you all the best with the new member of your family.

I know you put a lot of effort into your presentation to the Monty Program board regarding transfer of trademark ownership, and you know (and I do not mind saying externally) that I supported transfer to a non-profit designed for such purposes. Our informal, non-inclusive vote in Istanbul aside, I think the company as a whole should put a lot of thought into such matters. …

Recently in MariaDB #2

There has been a lot happening in the MariaDB community recently, and there has been growth. Here are some of the highlights. Thank you to all our current contributors, and to others that want to contribute, shoot community[at]askmonty[dot]org an e-mail.

MariaDB 5.2.3 binaries for Solaris and Debian Sparc

Our Sparc community contributor, Mark, has continued to make popular binaries for Solaris 10 and Debian Sparc. He’s kept up to speed with MariaDB 5.2.3, so please visit him and download the binaries.

MariaDB 5.2.3 on the openSUSE Build Service

Community contributor Michal Hrušecký has packaged MariaDB for openSUSE and its available via the openSUSE build service.

MariaDB 5.2 is released as stable

I am happy to announce that MariaDB 5.2.3 is now released as a stable release.

During the gamma period we did not receive any serious reports for issues in 5.2, so we are relatively confident that the new code is of decent quality.

You can read about the features of MariaDB 5.2 in my previous blog entry or in the fast growing MariaDB knowledgebase..

What is most interesting about MariaDB 5.2 is that most of the features came from the MariaDB/MySQL community, not from Monty Program Ab!

Without the community it would not have been possible to do a stable release so soon after the last release. …

Segmented key cache performance results for MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma

Recently I tested our new segmented key cache feature for MyISAM in MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma for performance gains. You can check our new features in MariaDB 5.2 in our Ask Monty Knowledge Base

You will also find the details about the segmented key cache feature in our Knowledge Base at:

We wrote a test in LUA for SysBench v0.5 called select_random_points.lua, to figure out the performance gain of splitting the key cache’s global mutex into several mutex under multi user load. …