Celebrating Olivier Bertrand of the CONNECT Engine

Please join MariaDB Foundation in giving a bit of financial recognition to Olivier Bertrand, the developer behind the CONNECT Storage Engine! We will match your contribution up to a total of 5.000 €, on top of the 5.000 € that we have already allocated 5000 € for Olivier Bertrand’s Lifetime MariaDB Contribution Award.

What is CONNECT?

Olivier Bertrand is an unsung hero. He is the original contributor and still the main developer behind the CONNECT Storage Engine, which – much as its descriptive name indicates – enables MariaDB Server users to connect to a variety of databases other than MariaDB Server itself.

MariaDB Server Documentation as PDF

MariaDB Server Documentation is now released as a single PDF file, browsable offline. Download the over 3000 pages and check it out!

Better late than never

Some things take long! In 2014, there was a request on Jira for delivering the MariaDB Server Knowledgebase in one PDF file. That’s over seven years ago. MDEV-6881, you see it in the number already – we are now at well beyond MDEV-28000.

The request has always been in the back of our heads. What triggered it now was playing around with Python and the relative ease of transforming one format to another, including PDF.

We stand with Ukraine

This is a difficult blog entry to write. It involves war. But not a flame war. A real war where people are dying. Innocent people. You have all seen the pictures and videos, it is not my task to describe that.

MariaDB Foundation has been slow to react. This is because we have strong ties to both Ukrainian and Russian developers and we want to do the right thing, as individuals and as the Foundation. Let it be perfectly clear that MariaDB Foundation stands with Ukraine; that said, the rest of the blog is not written in first person plural.

MariaDB in 2021

At Vettabase we support various databases,and in particular we are MariaDB enthusiasts. Even more, we’re proud to be MariaDB Foundation Technology Partners. So I’m happy to write this small wrap-up about the MariaDB Foundation public activities in 2021! Just a disclaimer before starting: this is not an official retrospective, it’s a subjective, opinionated one. My opinions represent myself alone. So here is my favourite 2021 news in the MariaDB world…

MariaDB 10.6 went Generally Available in November (I wrote a summary on Vettabase website). A couple of unmaintained storage engines were removed, as well as 23 InnoDB variables.

Tricky Problems? MariaDB debug container

MariaDB does have bugs. Users see them sometimes. Sometimes developers look for a long time at bug reports and code and still cannot see how the situation occurred. Developers during their analysis ask questions like:

  • I wonder if this was already fixed in {not released version}? But how can I ask a user to test that?
  • Can I get the user to get good stack trace that would help understand this better? But users sometimes find this hard.
  • What exact hardware and kernel configuration is this bug occurring on? And how would I reproduce this?

New Service – quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel

During the development of MariaDB, a lot of things are tested. However the most important workload to be tested is the one we don’t have access to, and that is your workload.

As many of you run your own CI, we’d like you to invite you to join the testing of MariaDB. quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel is a container repository using the latest from our main stable branches. By the time any code gets into these branches it has been reviewed and passed our tests. The developers of the change consider it finished, so this is the perfect time to take this code and test it on your workload.

Server MiniFest Wed 10 Dec 2021: From the Frontlines

Join our next Server MiniFest, to get the latest news from the MariaDB Server frontlines – in a fresh format inspired by Not the Nine O’Clock News.

Not the Nine O’Clock News?

We may not be as funny as the famous BBC2 sketch comedy aired 1979-82. Let me correct myself: We don’t even aspire to be funny. But we do want to be interesting to follow, and make it easy for you to keep watching – not switching off the MariaDB channel for something else.

And we do that by replicating the fast tempo of the comedy role model.

MariaDB & Python: A Match?

Python is my personal favourite programming language, at least this century. So when the opportunity presented itself to have a talk at PyConZA, off I went. Not to South Africa in person, for a 40 minute talk, though.

Technical challenges on Streamyard

It was a live presentation, streamed on Streamyard with chat on Discord. I complained of the bad connectivity I had in central Munich, much to the amusement of the South African audience, which evidently thought they were role models and market leaders when it comes to bad Internet.