Category Archives: Contributions
Another quarter year has gone by, and in the world of MariaDB, it is time for another contributions report. The raw data for this report can be found on GitHub, here.
Server contributions
Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server so far this year.
| MariaDB Plc | 29 | 1262 |
| MariaDB Foundation | 6 | 123 |
| Codership | 7 | 77 |
| Independent | 17 | 57 |
| Amazon | 12 | 50 |
| Arch Linux | 1 | 6 |
| GSoC | 3 | 5 |
| IONOS | 1 | 4 |
| Alibaba | 1 | 3 |
| Rakuten | 1 | 3 |
| HardenedBSD | 1 | 2 |
| OpenBSD | 1 | 2 |
| University of Sydney | 1 | 2 |
| Arm | 1 | 1 |
| Chainguard | 1 | 1 |
| ClearCode | 1 | 1 |
| FreeBSD | 1 | 1 |
| IBM | 1 | 1 |
MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 8th October 2024
There have been some interesting things to note here.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024”
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 normally announce releases and the end of life of releases, but today we are going to try something a little different, an announcement of “start of life”.
What does this mean?
The way we use GitHub is a little different to most projects. Instead of having a mainline and branching versions from that, MariaDB Server creates a new branch from the previous version. This is intended to happen shortly after the preview release of the previous version, but for various reasons it can come a little later. So by default, after the hypothetical version 11.7.0 is released, we will create the 11.8 branch in GitHub soon after.
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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”
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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