Category Archives: Community
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.
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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.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main””
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.
| 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.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, July 2024”
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.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Have your say”
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”.
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Continue reading “Improving MariaDB support in open source projects”
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.
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Continue reading “How Intel helps MariaDB become even faster”
Both MariaDB and MySQL have been around a long time now, and there is always a difficult balance between maintaining compatibility whilst also solving security issues that arise. With the latest bugfix releases of MariaDB, we had to break compatibility a little to improve security, but there are workarounds. We figured we should explain the reasons behind it and how to make things as painless as possible for you.
The Problem
The problem we were solving, and for various reasons we had to do it very quickly, is that it is possible to generate a malicious MariaDB dump file which could execute shell commands from the MariaDB client.
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A healthy ecosystem around MariaDB Server involves an active community. Lots of happy code contributors cause fast development of new functionality, as well as increased adoption by users. Users see the vibrancy of the contributor space as a sign of health, rightfully so. Hence, preventive health care “with daily exercise and good eating habits” is high on the agenda of MariaDB Foundation.
But in practice, improving MariaDB’s habits around code development is about as easy as improving individual life habits in general, particularly if you are under public scrutiny. Let me here share a few thoughts on our progress, and solicit some input.
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