Ornery Oneiric

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. …

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)]> …

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; …

Welcome to our group blog

At Monty Program Ab, communication is important to us. Being 2010, it seemed sensible that the best way for us to communicate with the masses, is to create a company/group blog. So welcome to the blog!

Our aims are simple: we hope to write 2-3 entries every week, some of it technical, some of it fun, and some of it announcing our new and cool offerings. Everyone in the company will blog here, so expect to hear interesting things from the web team, the sysadmin team, and more. Of course, we’ll try our level best to keep it MariaDB specific, to hook onto your interest. …