MP Istanbul 2010 T-Shirt Giveaway: the winners and extension!

And the winners are, …

There was quite a rush for the t-shirts and we have our three winners:

* Antony Curtis http://antbits.blogspot.com/
* Ray Kawalec http://www.traenq.com/
* Patrick Crews http://www.wc220.com/

Next round

Due to your high interest in our Istanbul2010 t-shirts, we are extending our giveaway quiz until November 30th.

Question: What is Maria in MariaDB and how is it connected to My and Max?

Email your answers to “istanbul2010-contest [at] askmonty (dot) o r g” before 30 Nov 2010. Good luck!

By the way, the design on the t-shirts looks like this:

Şerefe! – The MariaDB Knowledge Base in Istanbul

Monty Program along with various guests and our friends at the recently founded SkySQL recently wrapped up a meeting in Istanbul Turkey. Sadly it rained most days but we had a good time and got a lot done.

Besides learning how to say “Şerefe” which is “Cheers” in Turkish, we discussed the future of MariaDB, our companies goals, the MariaDB knowledge base and many other topics. Since I am the web guy, I lead the presentation / talk on the KB and thought I would share some highpoints of it with you.

If you don’t know, the KB is located at http://kb.askmonty.org. …

MP Istanbul 2010 T-Shirt Giveaway

We saved three XL-sized t-shirts from our recent all-company meeting in Istanbul. At first we thought it would be a good idea to give away the shirts through a random drawing. But after mulling it around in our minds for a day or two, we thought we should make it a bit more fun, so we decided to have a small quiz (don’t worry, it’s only one easy question).

Before we get to that, here’s a run-down of what we did in Istanbul. Our community and documentation guys (Daniel Bartholomew, Colin Charles, and Kurt von Finck) had the great idea to create an “Istanbul Haber” (aka Istanbul newspaper) for each day of the meeting. …

Powered by MariaDB badges

There are more sites out there that have their backends running MariaDB. In fact, as we work to get it recommended alongside its upstream provider, it seemed time to have “Powered by MariaDB” logos. Check out the badges that Daniel created. Feel free to copy the images or hotlink them from the server.

As an aside, would any readers be interested in purchasing t-shirts or other MariaDB merchandise? What merchandise should we make, besides just stickers?

Making upgrades from MySQL 5.0 easier

The intention from the start was to make upgrades to newer MySQL versions trivial. We have done a lot of work to keep data formats compatible (both in the .frm files and in the storage engines); when you install a new version of MySQL things should “just work”.

For a long time this was true, until MySQL 5.0 where we had to do some data incompatible changes, like in the way some characters were sorted and how end-of-line blanks were stored in indexes.

To make the upgrade process easy, we created the ‘mysql_upgrade’ program which should detect possible incompatible tables and automatically convert data as needed. …

Rename Maria Contest Winner

After two months of submissions, Monty Program employee review, community voting and Monty’s final decision, we are happy to announce that the Maria storage engine will henceforth be known as …

Aria!

Congratulations to Chris Tooley who suggested the name. Chris said about Aria in his submission, “Maria without the ‘M’, plus aria is a pleasant musical term.” Chris is now the proud new owner of a System 76 Meerkat net-top computer. Thanks to our good friends at System76 for providing this nifty prize.

Hopefully, in time, “Aria” will also be a pleasing database engine term. …

O’Reilly speaks to Kurt von Finck

At the recent O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, the nice folk at O’Reilly Media got to speak to Kurt von Finck, Chief Community and Communications Officer for Monty Program Ab, about how we handle releases, why we are a superset of MySQL and more. Watch the 7 minute video, and do give us some feedback here in the comments.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_AWBatycCE …