Tickets to giveaway for Percona Live NYC

We all know that Kurt von Finck is going to give a talk at Percona Live NYC happening May 26 2011. If you want to attend we’ve got three tickets to give away (worth USD$249 each).

This should be the easiest contest ever to enter and win. Just go to the Knowledgebase, create an account and write one new article, longer than 2 paragraphs. Once you’re done, send a quick email to community@montyprogram.com with a link to the article, and if there is no duplicate content already on the Knowledgebase, you’ll get your ticket to Percona Live NYC.

Q&A with Monty by PacktPub

Monty just got interviewed by Packt Publishing in a Q&A format. There’s no way to comment on that article, so I’m wondering if you have any feedback — drop it here.

Also decided to start collecting interviews related to MariaDB on the Knowledgebase. Remember that its open for all to edit, so sign up.

Newsletters from the MariaDB dev meeting in Lisbon

Every morning before any of the meetings get started I print out a small one page newsletter which contains (among other things) the program for the day. Rather than keep them private, Colin suggested I post them here. I call the newsletter the “MariaDB Programador de Journal” which (I think) translates to “MariaDB Programmer’s Journal” in Portuguese.

[Updated, 13 Mar 2011, to add the newsletter for that day.]

At the meeting we’ve also been taking notes and posting them online for what improvements we want to make this year in MariaDB to make it even better. …

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. …