Category Archives: Development
Last Friday, we hosted an Ask Me Anything session with HackerEarth – and we promised to share the same insights here in written form. So here it is: your guide to success in the MariaDB Python Hackathon!
A Great Idea Is Only the Beginning
A brilliant idea submission is just the start. The real work lies in the development — and that’s exactly what’s happening this month.
We want you to succeed. Success can mean that your hackathon contribution is widely used, that it puts you in the spotlight, and that it builds your reputation as a developer who makes a real impact.
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Continue reading “How to Succeed in the MariaDB Python Hackathon, Bangalore”
Not what AI can do for MariaDB – but what MariaDB can do for AI
I have hinted at this before (This Month in MariaDB – August 2025), but it deserves to be said again: our vision for MariaDB’s role in AI is both clear and ambitious. We do not simply want to participate in the AI space – we aim to be the bridge between real-world data and modern AI systems.
Large Language Models are, at their core, vast read-only neural networks. The data that organisations truly depend upon does not reside inside these models;
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Continue reading “MariaDB and AI: Building the Bridge That Really Matters”
The final days are here for the Foundation’s first large-scale hackathon, the MariaDB Python Hackathon we’re organising in partnership with BangPypers (the Bangalore Python Meetup, a group with about 14,000 members) and HackerEarth (a Hackathon organiser). Do come with your final submissions of ideas at mariadb-python.hackerearth.com within the next two days – in October, it’s development time!
The magnitude is new for MariaDB Foundation
Already, we’re quite proud of the results. Last Wednesday, I reported to the MariaDB Foundation Board meeting that we have over 3,000 registered individuals and 250 team idea submissions.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Bangalore Hackathon: Ideation Phase Closing”
August may have been a holiday month for many, but the MariaDB community certainly didn’t take a break. From Amsterdam to Bengaluru, from deep technical dives to festive dinners, August brought us fresh insights, new collaborations, and plenty of reasons to be excited about the road ahead.
Community Interaction at Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Amsterdam
MariaDB Foundation proudly joined the Open Source Summit in Amsterdam, hosted by the Linux Foundation (LF OSS). Alongside me, Vlad Radu represented the Foundation at our booth – joined by none other than Michael “Monty” Widenius (founder of both MariaDB and MySQL) and Sergei Golubchik (Chief Architect of MariaDB Server).
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Continue reading “This Month in MariaDB Foundation: August 2025”
Earlier I posted that this presentation was about to happen, and it did! I presented to a keen audience of over 20 people live, and number who watched later (it was in a rather early US time, however attracted a number of attendees from Europe, India, Thailand all the way to east of Australia at UTC+10:30.
Below is the video, and the slide outline is available.
The journey to this presentation began as a request to update our Clang version that we use in Buildbot, MariaDB’s CI system.
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Continue reading “Deep dive into Clang sanitizer testing with MariaDB (Post Event)”
That’s the question every tester dreads to hear, because it usually means we’ve let something really embarrassing slip into a release.
The real answer is, “Yes, we do,” though that doesn’t offer much comfort if you’re facing issues in production. Still, during quieter moments, people sometimes ask less rhetorically what kind of testing takes place in MariaDB. Let’s dive into that.
A path of a bugfix into a maintenance release
When a pull request (or an internal patch outside the PR system) is pushed into the MariaDB/server repository on Github, it is picked by the MariaDB server CI, Buildbot.
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For historical reasons, the handling of FOREIGN KEY constraints in MariaDB Server is somewhat peculiar. Unlike CHECK constraints, which are being enforced at the query execution layer for all tables, FOREIGN KEY constraint definitions will simply be ignored unless the underlying storage engine supports them.
The storage engine is not only responsible for enforcing referential integrity between tables, but also storing the constraint definitions. Currently, InnoDB is the only storage engine that supports foreign key constraints, between persistent, non-partitioned tables.
Partitioning is implemented by a storage engine wrapper that makes each partition or subpartition appear as a separate table in the underlying storage engine.
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Continue reading “Per-table unique FOREIGN KEY constraint names – new feature in MariaDB 12.1”
At some point, nearly every developer encounters a common challenge: working with deeply nested JSON only to run into an arbitrary depth limit imposed by the database. In our case, that hard cap was set at 32 levels — sufficient for many scenarios but too restrictive for more complex or dynamic data structures. To address this, we decided to remove the limitation entirely.
The database now supports JSON documents and JSON paths with virtually unlimited nesting! This change unlocks the ability to work with more flexible and expressive data models without forcing developers to restructure or flatten their data.
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Continue reading “Make JSON DEPTH unlimited – new feature in MariaDB 12.1”