Deep dive into Clang sanitizer testing with MariaDB

MariaDB uses Clang’s memory, address, and undefined behavior sanitizers are used for identify coding flaws during the continuous development and testing process. MariaDB would like to share via an online event on how easy perform the same sanitizer checking.

The MemorySanitizer environment is particularly onerous to create. Because MariaDB use container based build and testing, we have an environment that can be re-used by anyone.

Our “Deep Dives” were once an internal skills transfer mechanism, however for the first time we’re making it available for anyone to join.

This particular deep dive will cover:

Always use the right UUID in MariaDB

The following post was written by Stefano Petrilli, who contributed UUIDv4 and UUIDv7 implementations to MariaDB. Thank you, Stefano!


The original version of the Universal Unique IDentifiers (UUID), which is now known as UUIDv1, made his first appearance in the 1980s. The most interesting guarantee that they provide is the generation of IDs that are always unique across space and time.

To comply with this promise, it uses a combination of three elements:

  • The node, which is a field that identifies the machine that generated the UUID.

First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB

At MariaDB Day in February in Brussels, VP Engineering Vicențiu Ciurbaru delivered an inspiring presentation titled “Launch Your Open Source Career: First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB.”

In the spirit of the recent positive stats on new contributions to MariaDB, let me recap Vicentiu’s tips for anyone looking to make their first contribution. 

Contributing to MariaDB is not only about writing code—it’s about joining a vibrant community where every contribution, big or small, drives innovation. We hope newcomers can see a tangible path to getting involved.

How to start contributing? 

Why contribute? Scratch your own itch!

Scratch you own itch, and help others while at it!

Why do people contribute to Open Source projects?

The question is as old as Open Source and its predecessor Free Software: Why do people contribute? We re-asked the oldie-but-goodie, and got results that confirm the old adage about scratching your own itch.

Fixing work or personal needs

The most popular answer? Fixing work or personal needs. It got 44 %, nearly half the votes. You simply need to get the job done, and there is an Open Source project that almost does it already.

“Amen” statement for committing transactions

Every once in a while a truly inspiring contribution comes to us at MariaDB. Today’s timely contribution was from Sigma, and their inspiring contribution was in pull request 3937 which adds the AMEN statement for committing transactions. The need for harmonizing cultural norms with SQL standards is largely under explored aspect of engineering and here seems to be a good a place to start as any.

As described:

This pull request introduces a new statement, amen, which serves as an alternative to the traditional commit command in MariaDB. The motivation behind this change is to provide a more thematic and culturally resonant way to conclude transactions, reflecting the religious connotation of the name “MariaDB”.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January 2025

Here comes the Q4 2024 contributions report. The raw data which contains also statistics until today 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 during 2024.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
MariaDB Plc. 31 1707
MariaDB Foundation 9 201
Codership 7 103
Amazon 12 51
Independent 19 48
GSoC 3 14
Arch Linux 1 6
Alibaba 1 4
IONOS 1 4
Workato 1 4
Rakuten 1 3
OpenBSD 1 2
HardenedBSD 1 2
University of Sydney 1 2
Arm 1 1
ClearCode 1 1
FreeBSD 1 1
IBM 1 1
NetBSD 1 1
Chainguard 1 1
CloudLinux 1 1
TOTAL 96 2158

MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 31st December 2024

We can see some new names compared to the Q3 2024 report, with contributions from CloudLinux, NetBSD and Workato.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024

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.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
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.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

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.