Category Archives: Development
One of the goals of the MariaDB Foundation is to help new contributors understand the source code and to lower the barrier for new participants. One way to measure this is to look at the number of pull requests received and accepted, as these mostly reflect community contributions. The figures below are for the main server only, not any of the connectors or tools hosted on the Foundation’s GitHub account, and for the period 1 January to 1 July 2017.
Number of GitHub pull requests received: 126 (+113% Year-on-Year)
Number of pull requests reviewed: 102 (+76% YoY)
Number of contributors: 28 (+22% YoY)
Number of reviewers: 13 (+44% YoY)
By comparison, here are the equivalent figures for MySQL:
Number of GitHub pull requests received: 35 (-10% Year-on-Year)
Number of contributors: 19 (+27% YoY)
Although the MariaDB codebase is large and complex, we’re happy to see that there have been some interesting and important contributions from the community. …
My first encounter with the gdb command duel was on some old IRIX about 15 years ago. I immediately loved how convenient it was for displaying various data structures during MySQL debugging, and I wished Linux had something similar. Later I found out that Duel was not something IRIX specific, but a public domain patch for gdb 4.6 written in ’93 by Michael Golan. Unfortunately, it never got into gdb (for licensing reasons, so I’ve heard). Now the gdb 8 is out, and the patch, obviously doesn’t apply. Instead of fixing the patch, I’ve re-implemented Duel in Python, using gdb Python API and the Arpeggio parser. …
Continue reading “Duel: gdb vs. linked lists, trees, and hash tables”
Anyone who has peeked inside a gdb manual knows that gdb has some kind of Python API. And anyone who has skimmed through has seen something called “Pretty Printing” that supposedly tells gdb how to print complex data structures in a nice and readable way. Well, at least I have seen that, but I’ve never given it much thought. Still, one day, when I was typing:
(gdb) p/t table->read_set->bitmap[0] @ (table->read_set->n_bits+7)/8
for the umpteenth time I asked myself, “why the heck not?”, and so it begun…
(more…) …
Continue reading “Making life prettier with gdb PrettyPrinting API”
MySQL 3.20 to 4.0
In the good old days, when 32MB of RAM justified the name my-huge.cnf, when nobody knew Google and Facebook didn’t even exist, security was… how do I put it… kind of cute. Computer viruses didn’t steal millions and didn’t disrupt elections — they played Yankee Doodle or told you not to play with the PC. People used telnet and ftp, although some security conscious admins already knew ssh.
Somewhere around this time, give or take a few years, MySQL was born. And it had users, who had to be kept away from seeing others’ data, but allowed to use their own. …
The 2017 MariaDB Developers Conference is crossing the ocean this year, and will be taking place in New York, from 9 to 10 April.
The unconference will last for two days and you can join for the whole time, or as little time as you wish.
The schedule of this unconference will be drafted in a public spreadsheet. Initially, anyone attending can help set the schedule by adding sessions, as well as voting for sessions they’re interested in, by incrementing the vote counter. Based on this, the schedule will be drawn up.
BNY Mellon are kindly hosting this years event. …
I’ve collected slides and videos from several of the presentations given at the MariaDB Developers Meetup in Amsterdam, 6-8 October 2016. This meetup was kindly hosted by Booking.com. The presentations are listed here in roughly the order they were given. If I have both the slides and video for a given talk I link to both, otherwise I just link to what I have. The video is of poor quality as it was livestreamed to Periscope from a handheld mobile phone. Network issues also mean the streams sometimes dropped and had to be restarted. I will update this post as a receive slide decks from other speakers. …
Continue reading “2016 MariaDB Developers Meetup Presentations”
I had the honor of leading a session on Saturday, during the MariaDB Developers Meeting in Amsterdam, brainstorming around MariaDB Server 10.3. It’s definitely time to do that since MariaDB Server 10.2 has entered beta stage. In case you have missed that, I’ve wrapped up what’s included in 10.2 so far in a blog post on my employer’s site. In addition to the features mentioned in that blog post there are a couple of features still coming in 10.2 of which the most notable is that the MyRocks engine will be included. More about this later in another article. …
The 2016 MariaDB Developers Meetup will be taking place in Amsterdam, from 6 – 8 October.
The meetup will last for three days and you can join for the whole time, or as little time as you wish.
The schedule of this unconference will be drafted in a public spreadsheet. Initially, anyone attending can help set the schedule by adding sessions, as well as voting for session’s they’re interested in, by incrementing the vote counter. Based on this, the schedule will be drawn up.
The event venue and lunches are sponsored by Booking.com. …