Early tests show MariaDB 5.3.0 having a performance speed-up against DBT-3 query set

Posted recently on the maria-developers mailing list, by Igor Babaev, Principal MariaDB developer at Monty Program is some interesting preliminary results for MariaDB 5.3.0 benchmarked against the DBT-3 benchmarking program.

DBT-3 is a benchmark to test a decision support workload, with a suite of business-oriented queries and concurrent data modifications.

Read Igor’s discoveries, which he ran on a laptop with 4 cores (multi-threaded = 8 cores in total), 8GB RAM and SSD on SuSE, and as Igor says, enjoy his numbers. It is a repeatable benchmark with all settings included.

Progress Reporting in MariaDB 5.3

There are many new features in MariaDB 5.3. I’m looking forward to many of them, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is Progress Reporting.

It’s a fact of life in the database world that some commands take longer to run than others. Commands like ALTER TABLE, LOAD DATA INFILE, and adding and dropping an index simply take time to run, depending (of course) on your data and schema. I always have hated having to wait for those commands to run with no indication of how much progress has been made or how much is left to do. …

How the MariaDB download system works

During my years at MySQL AB I had the unfortunate task of manually maintaining the download page for enterprise customers. This involved a ton of boring, error prone work and almost always led to some sort of error every release. Some of our downloads were eventually replaced with an automated system written by the web team but the memory of all that time wasted still hurts me. So when I joined Monty Program and saw our downloads were manually maintained in mediawiki I knew something had to change.

Most of the websites for Monty Program and the MariaDB project are written with Django so this is where I started. …

Looking for a Few Good Examples

In the #maria IRC channel the other day I fielded a question someone had about a DATETIME column where they wanted to SELECT by the year. The answer (which is probably obvious to many of you) is to use the YEAR() function like so:
select * from t1 where YEAR(d) = 2011;
(The above assumes the table is named “t1” and the DATETIME column is named “d”.)

In my reply I provided a link to the Date and Time Functions section of the AskMonty Knowledgebase, but when I looked at the entry for the YEAR() function, I noticed that the example given (which originated from the file scripts/fill_help_tables.sql which is found in the MySQL and MariaDB source) was not very helpful:
MariaDB [(none)]> …

The AskMonty Knowledge Base – Open for editing

Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. …

After SQL-99, What’s Next?

As Hakan mentioned previously, the full text of SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, is now in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. Importing the text and formatting it for the Knowledgebase was a major project and I’m glad that it’s done.

Having the full text of this book freely available is a great thing for anyone who uses SQL because the book is about the SQL-99 standard and not about any particular database implementation. They do talk about different implementations, but those sections are clearly marked as such, and serve as examples of  how some databases implement (or diverge from) the standard.

MariaDB and TokuDB

I was happy to see the announcement yesterday from Tokutek regarding their addition of MariaDB to their list of supported platforms for the TokuDB storage engine.

One particular item in the press release caught my eye: “Our customers are choosing MariaDB more and more frequently for their most demanding database applications.” We’ve added many new features over the past year in our various 5.1 and 5.2 releases, but beyond the new goodies we’ve focused a lot of energy on removing bugs and improving performance. We’ve known for a while that MariaDB is the best version of MySQL out there; …

The “MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development” book is finally published

If you want to know more about MySQL and MariaDB plugins read below. Our (Andrew Hutchings and mine) book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development was just published by Packt. As far as I know it’s the first and the only book completely dedicated to MySQL Plugin API. It covers all existing in 5.1 plugin types, from Daemon to Storage Engines, and does not shun from explaining less known or poorly understood features of the plugin API. It describes newer plugin API extensions too – such as authentication plugins and recent CREATE TABLE extension. …