MariaDB is part of Google Summer of Code 2023

We are excited to announce that this year MariaDB has once again been accepted as a Google Summer of Code organization. With this blog post I want to showcase the projects we’re taking on and wish good luck to our mentees for the summer!

At MariaDB we strongly believe in growing Open Source and we encourage new developers to contribute. Google Summer of Code allows us to have dedicated contributors focus on a project for a few months, knowing the costs are covered. We at MariaDB can then just focus on the core aspects – writing code and growing our community.

MariaDB Health Checks in WordPress

In a previous blog post, I gave an overview of the CloudFest Hackathon. At this event my team created a plugin for WordPress which added additional health checks for MariaDB. Since the Hackathon we have managed to get this plugin into the official WordPress plugin repository and are working on improving it.

About the plugin

The plugin is designed in a modular way with multiple parts that can be useful for WordPress administrators. The following is a breakdown of all the parts currently in the plugin.

Metrics

One of the core features is gathering metrics about the queries executed.

Coming to a language near you!

In a movie theater near you, expect to soon see an explanation of MariaDB Server and MariaDB Foundation in your own language! That is, providing you speak one of the good dozen of languages we have frequently encountered in the MariaDB Server ecosystem.

English is a least common denominator

Like a majority of the MariaDB Server users, most of the developers behind MariaDB Server are non-native English speakers. We use Bad English as our lingua franca. Our pronunciation may be bearable to OK, but as with most techies, our understanding of written and spoken English is OK to good.

Data migration from Oracle to MariaDB with Docker and Connect SE: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this blog we are going to learn how to migrate data from Oracle to MariaDB.

To begin, we’ll learn the basics about Oracle database to have an understanding about the steps that are done on the demo example. After, we will create a table in Oracle and migrate it to MariaDB.

To migrate data from Oracle there are 2 ways:

  1. Dump Oracle data to CSV and load data in MariaDB.
  2. Use the Connect Storage Engine to create or insert into a table from Oracle’s source definition.

For demonstration, we are going to use a docker container with an Oracle Express Edition (XE) image.

MariaDB Coding Standards

Coding standards are often as hotly debated as vim vs emacs and other developer arguments. Viewers of the show Silicon Valley will all know the “tabs vs spaces” scene and how passionate people can be about it. Whilst I do personally have a preference (I’m not sharing it here), I feel it is much more important that people stick to one standard for a code base.

Standards Story

Several months ago a new community developer for MariaDB Server sent me a message asking where to find our coding standards document. After a bit of searching I realised we did not have one, and if we want to onboard new developers we definitely should have one.

Code of Conduct Update

Back in December, we asked for your feedback on implementing a code of conduct in the MariaDB Server community. We have seen some great feedback and observations from this and today we are have published version 1.0 of our code of conduct.

Feedback

The feedback we have received has been generally positive both when it comes to implementing a code of conduct in general, and to the content of the text.

That said, it was suggested by Brian Andrus that we better define “inflammatory language”; this is something we actually discussed internally prior to the draft content.

Ask ChatGPT: MariaDB Performance Tuning: Tips and Tricks

This is the next in the series of posts exploring ChatGPT and its insights about MariaDB. The series began with ChatGPT, OpenAI and MariaDB Foundation, followed by Ask ChatGPT – Getting Started with MariaDB: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners.

This week’s topic, suggested by ChatGPT itself, was “MariaDB Performance Tuning”. So how did it do?

MariaDB is undoubtedly one of the most popular open-source database management systems available today, with a strong focus on performance and ease of use. Whether you are a developer, database administrator, or an IT professional, ensuring that your MariaDB installation performs efficiently is crucial.

Ask ChatGPT – Getting Started with MariaDB: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

This is the next in a series of posts on our explorations with ChatGPT that started with ChatGPT, OpenAI and MariaDB Foundation. Here, we asked ChatGPT to generate a blog post, and Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Black reviewed the results.

“Getting Started with MariaDB: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners” is the question we asked ChatGPT. What we got is below. Rather than a blog on what you could have done yourself, I’ll look through the answer below and see how accurate it is, what could be better/worse, and assume this is some reflection on the references that the engine was trained on.