Screencast: Installing MariaDB on Windows

A screencast demonstrating the MariaDB Windows installer.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQPnCxJMOWI

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links:

Acknowledgments:

A big thanks to Vladislav Vaintroub, MariaDB’s Windows guru, and to Rasmus Johansson for help with the screencast. …

Screencast: MariaDB GIS demo

Here’s another MariaDB screencast, this time highlighting some of the GIS functionality in MariaDB.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDm_8L1oyI

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links and notes:

Acknowledgments:

A big thanks to Alexey Botchkov, MariaDB’s GIS guru, for the example data and help with the screencast. …

Screencast: Installing MariaDB

Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF7wChx0uzQ

Some notes:

  • The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
  • As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user.

Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB

The MySQL community has something new on their radar. First up, it looks like MySQL is now part of Oracle Software Security Assurance, and this is something all MySQL users should be happy about. Next, it is worth noting that MySQL is now part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (Oracle CPU), as the MySQL product line has made it into its first Oracle CPU advisory for January 2012.

As part of the MySQL community, CPU’s are new to us — they are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October.

Wrapping up MariaDB 2011

Parts of the world are already celebrating Christmas Eve and it’s time to relax and spend time with family and friends. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas this is when there is time for less work. Here are a few words to round off MariaDB’s current state and where it’s heading.

This year culminated in MariaDB 5.3.3, the release candidate of 5.3. This is a significant release that makes years of work available by default in the database server. Earlier releases still required features to be explicitly switched on, but thanks to thorough testing assuring the quality of the new functionality we have now enabled them. …

Writing a MariaDB PAM Authentication Plugin

As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.

Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication method remains a simple username/password combination. …

MariaDB in Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. …

MariaDB User Feedback

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak. …