Challenges and Visions for MariaDB Server

At the MariaDB Foundation, we want MariaDB Server to be a model citizen in the Open Source world. For now, there is a sizeable gap between dreams and reality. But that doesn’t stop us from striving to improve. Let me here describe some of our challenges, and share some visions of where we want to be.

Continuous Integration

One pain point is the state of the development tree. A model citizen would ensure that the tree can always be built. Every day, all the features under development could be tested by the community, on all platforms.

Docker Library – Official MariaDB Image Maintenance

The Docker Library official MariaDB image is now maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, and has been for the last six months. If you didn’t notice, we’ll take that as a compliment, as the previous maintainers of Docker Library from Infosiftr were doing a good job already. Infosiftr still provide valuable quality assurance on the releases before they get to you.

What’s Changed?

What we have done, with assistance from you, our community, is:

Timezones

  • Continued the parting contribution by Infosiftr MARIADB_* environment names and added MARIADB_INITDB_SKIP_TZINFO for consistency.
  • Allowed the timezone to be changed.

Purge of End of Life versions from Mirrors

OSU Open Source Labs have supported MariaDB for many years in hosting the mirror from which we distribute our releases for which we are most grateful. We were asked if we could reduce the size as our mirror usage had grown to 1TB, rather high compared to other projects.

To accommodate this request we removed all of the end of life releases, 5.5, 10.0 and 10.1 from the mirrors halving the used space.

MariaDB space usage on OSU Open Source Lab mirror

It turns out there were some continuous integration systems still using these repositories.

Debian/Ubuntu packaging expert wanted

MariaDB Foundation needs help from a Debian/Ubuntu packaging expert to continue to provide high value MariaDB Server packaging.

MariaDB Server is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu distributions, and by MariaDB Foundation as a upstream repository. A significant effort occurred to make this possible and stable. MariaDB Foundation wants to continue to innovate in the packaging to provide the best out-of-the-box experience for our users. To ensure this innovation remains stable and considered for the wide range of Debian/Ubuntu users we require a person/company/collective, with a very high quality of packaging and communication skills, to work within the MariaDB community ecosystem to deliver this outcome.

MariaDB at Percona Live Online

Good news is that the MariaDB Foundation and members of the MariaDB community are participating in Percona Live Online on the 12th – 13th of May, and we are excited to interact with you there. This year there’s a dedicated MariaDB Community track, as well as sessions spread throughout the conference. There’s a diverse range of topics, and a few tutorials to go a little deeper. Here’s a selection of MariaDB-related sessions you can expect at Percona Live Online:

— First Day —

12th May, 06:30 – 07:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Daniel Black – MariaDB Foundation
Logical mariadb-dump –system migration

12th May, 11:00 – 12:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Valerii Kravchuk – MariaDB Corporation
Monitoring and Tracing MySQL or MariaDB Server With Bpftrace

12th May, 13:00 – 13:30 EDT (UTC -4)
Vicentiu Ciorbaru – MariaDB Foundation
What’s new in 10.6

12th May, 13:30 – 14:30 EDT (UTC -4)
Kaj Arnö – MariaDB Foundation
Collaboration in Open Source: A Q&A on GitHub, Jira, Zulip and Knowledge Base

12th May, 14:30 – 15:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Vicentiu Ciorbaru – MariaDB Foundation
JSON additions in MariaDB – featuring JSON_TABLE

12th May, 15:00 – 15:30 EDT (UTC -4)
Anna Widenius – MariaDB Foundation
Virtual work and leadership in the time of pandemics

12th May, 15:30 – 16:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Vicentiu Ciorbaru – MariaDB Foundation
MariaDB ColumnStore – A columnar storage engine, first class citizen in MariaDB

12th May, 16:00 – 17:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Federico Razzoli – Vettabase
Automating MariaDB deployments with Ansible

12th May, 17:00 – 18:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Valerii Kravchuk – MariaDB Corporation
Flame Graphs for MySQL DBAs

— Second Day —

13th May, 07:30 – 08:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Krunal Bauskar – Huawei
Open Source Databases and ARM

13th May, 08:30 – 09:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Pedro Albuquerque – TransferWise
MariaDB High Availability in a Cocktail Mix with Envoy and Orchestrator

13th May, 09:00 – 09:30 EDT (UTC -4)
Robert Bindar – MariaDB Foundation
MariaDB Notebooks in JupyterHub

13th May, 11:30 – 12:00 EDT (UTC -4)
Ian Gilfillan – MariaDB Foundation
When and why to use MariaDB: Key Features in 10.0 to 10.5

13th May, 12:00 – 12:15 EDT (UTC -4)
Kaj Arnö – MariaDB Foundation
Collaboration in Open Source: A Jungle that needs Structure

Webinar: AI in MariaDB with MindsDB

MindsDB is an AutoML framework that lets software engineers do machine learning, without having to go through the whole data science pipeline. Additionally, MindsDB has done a seamless integration with MariaDB, by making use of the Connect Storage Engine.

If you want to learn more about how you can do AI straight from inside MariaDB, register for the webinar on 18th of May 16:00 GMT. MariaDB Foundation, together with MindsDB will cover the following topics in detail:

  • Why AI inside the database makes sense
  • How MariaDB is built to facilitate AI integrations.

Poll: Which MariaDB Server version do you mainly run in production?

Our second poll aims to get to know you better by learning which version of MariaDB Server you primarily use in production. This helps us shift our priorities according to your needs and establish goals that align better with the popularity of the versions.

If you are curious about our previous polls, visit this link here.

Google Summer of Code 2021

Good news, for you and for us: We have been approved for this year’s edition of Google Summer of Code!

What is Google Summer of Code?

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code:

The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over. It was first held from May to August 2005.