Database changes should be SCARY

“The only workload that matters is my production workload” (for all values of “my”). So you can manage this responsibility, SCARY is a software tool which aims to take the uncertainty out of change; software, configuration and hardware changes. This is very early in development, but projects have to start somewhere.

SCARY takes a read view of the production database query execution, and does the equivalent query on a copy of the production database, that has differences. The query speed, query plan, data result (eventually) will be recorded along with what went on in production.

What programming languages do your applications that communicate with MariaDB use?

MariaDB Foundation polls are an informal way to get feedback from our community. They’ve always been a bit hidden, but the most recent poll sat on the mariadb.org front page for a while, and got a healthy 5,225 votes.

It asked “What programming languages do your applications that communicate with MariaDB use?”, and here are the results:

Python 30%
PHP 30%
Java 19%
NodeJS 16%
C# 15%
C/C++ 11%
Bash/Shell/Powershell 7%
Other 7%
TypeScript 6%
Go 6%
Rust 4%
R 3%
Ruby 2%

How do we use these results?

Join us in planning the MariaDB Server Roadmap

MariaDB Foundation is having its next planning session for the MariaDB Server Roadmap at our MariaDB Unconference Tue-Wed 3-4 October 2023.

All key contributors will be there

This will be a top-level meeting with representatives of all key contributors to MariaDB Server. From MariaDB plc, we will have CTO Jonah Harris and VP Server Engineering Sergei Golubchik representing management and resource allocation. But MariaDB Server is not a one-vendor product. We expect similar level representation from our second-biggest contributor, Amazon, and we also have confirmed roadmap attendance by Webpros, Alibaba, IBM, Intel, and others.

Run and operate MariaDB in Kubernetes with mariadb-operator

The introduction of the StatefulSet resource was a game changer when it comes to run stateful workloads in Kubernetes, introducing a wide range of features, including:

  • Predictable DNS names for each Pod, allowing one to individually address them in the network.
  • Stable persistent storage for each Pod, ensuring that each of them is bound to the same PersistentVolumeClaim.
  • Ordered graceful deployments and automated rolling updates.

However, this isn’t quite enough for running databases in Kubernetes in a reliable way. We are missing day 1 and day 2 operations, such as configuring high availability and scheduling backups, which is something not managed by vanilla Kubernetes.

Meaningful Response Metrics

There was a recent request by Eric Herman, the Chairperson of the MariaDB Foundation board, to add the time to first meaningful response for pull requests to the quarterly contributor metrics I generate and blog about. I thought this was a really good idea. There are a few problems with this, the first being the definition of “meaningful response”.

Meaningful Response

A “meaningful response” would likely be a response that adds value and shows that the pull request is being reviewed. The most accurate way to do this would be to manually record this using a set of criteria that defines what kind of responses are meaningful.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, June 2023

We are well into 2023 now, the time has really flown. There have already been two major versions of MariaDB Server that have reach GA, and with those, many new contributions. As with each quarterly metrics release, the raw data is available in our metrics repo, along with the scripts and configurations to generate it yourself.

Project Tracking

We are tracking multiple MariaDB related projects at the moment, many of which are pulled in when you build MariaDB Server. These include:

  • MariaDB Server – the server itself
  • libmarias3 – an open source library to talk to Amazon S3 and related block storage services.

Centralise all our mailing lists

We use a couple of mailing lists for discussing various topics with our community. For historical reason, some lists were hosted at http://lists.askmonty.org and other at https://lists.launchpad.net.

Regrouping our mailing list under the MariaDB Foundation domain was a long overdue topic and I finally decided to tackle it. This simplifies mailing list management and brings full control over how we send our emails (see bellow: SPF, DKIM and DMARC).

In this post I will present the new mailing list system that we have deployed and how we proceeded to moving to that new system.

MariaDB & IONOS: Improving performance for hosting

The MariaDB Foundation values our partnerships with our sponsors. Our partnership with IONOS allows us to get insight into how MariaDB Server is used and the direction it should take. As well as generally improving MariaDB Server in many different ways.

IONOS story

At CloudFest 2023, one of the first meetings we had was with Stefan Erkeling from IONOS. It was a very good meeting and it was great to see how much IONOS values our partnership. Stefan indicated in the meeting that there was a performance issue they were hitting and some advice was needed.