We are well into 2023 now, the time has really flown. There have already been two major versions of MariaDB Server that have reach GA, and with those, many new contributions. As with each quarterly metrics release, the raw data is available in our metrics repo, along with the scripts and configurations to generate it yourself.
Project Tracking
We are tracking multiple MariaDB related projects at the moment, many of which are pulled in when you build MariaDB Server. These include:
- MariaDB Server – the server itself
- libmarias3 – an open source library to talk to Amazon S3 and related block storage services. Maintained by MariaDB Plc. and used for Aria’s S3 storage and MariaDB ColumnStore
- MariaDB ColumnStore – a columnar based, clustered storage engine for MariaDB Server. Maintained by MariaDB Plc.
- MariaDB Docker – the official Docker image files for MariaDB Server. Maintained by the MariaDB Foundation
- MariaDB Jupyter Kernel – a Jupyter Notebook plugin for MariaDB Server. Maintained by the MariaDB Foundation
- MariaDB Connector/C – the C client library for MariaDB Server. Maintained by MariaDB Plc.
In the following table we show the number of hackers and commits so far this year from MariaDB Plc. and MariaDB Foundation combined, and then contributions by everyone else combined.
| Project | Hackers MariaDB | Commits MariaDB | Hackers Others | Commits Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MariaDB Server | 32 | 832 | 39 | 103 |
| libmarias3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| MariaDB ColumnStore Engine | 12 | 148 | 5 | 6 |
| MariaDB Docker | 2 | 43 | 1 | 2 |
| MariaDB Jupyter Kernel | 2 | 11 | 2 | 4 |
| MariaDB Connector/C | 4 | 60 | 0 | 0 |
As can be seen, MariaDB Server is not the only open source project that is within the MariaDB sphere. All of these projects welcome external contributions. There have been attempted external contributions to Connector/C, but so far these have not been merged by the Connectors team. At the MariaDB Foundation we do not have the ability to merge code for MariaDB Plc. projects, but we can comment and advise on both sides.
New Contributors
As we can see here, already in 2023 there have been more external contributors to MariaDB Server than internal ones. This is a great position to be, and I know that we will have even more external contributors as the year continues, for which we are very thankful. That being said I want to call out a few notable new contributors for 2023:
- Diogo Teles Sant’Anna from Google’s Open Source Security Team, who has provided some nice updates to our Markdown files. Documentation contributions are just as valuable as code.
- Junqi Xie, who is the Google Summer of Code contributor I am mentoring this year. His first contribution isn’t large, but he has a pull request near ready for merging which provides massive improvements to RocksDB.
- Amazon yet again are strong in 2023, they have already had 11 contributors and 33 commits and there are quite a few more already pending review. This will likely be the biggest year yet for Amazon’s MariaDB Server code contributions!
Year to Date
Let’s take a look at a comparison for 2022 and 2023 so far:
| Category | Entity | 2022 Contributors | 2022 Commits | 2023 Contributors | 2023 Commits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRDB | MariaDB Plc. | 36 | 1816 | 25 | 706 |
| MRDF | MariaDB Foundation | 8 | 179 | 7 | 126 |
| Provider | Codership | 5 | 32 | 6 | 36 |
| Sponsor | IBM | 1 | 1 | – | – |
| GSoC | GSoC | 3 | 34 | 1 | 1 |
| Distro | All Distros | 5 | 17 | 3 | 3 |
| Other | Amazon | 15 | 54 | 11 | 33 |
| Others | 40 | 68 | 17 | 65 | |
| TOTAL | 113 | 2201 | 70 | 970 |
Notes:
- Red Hat is in a grey area after the IBM acquisition. For this matrix, we have put them under “Distro”, separate from IBM and “Sponsor”.
- There are more entities in the “Sponsor” and “Provider” categories, but for simplification, these have been put into “Other” for this table along with independent contributors.
- Commits don’t always tell the full story, a commit could be anywhere between one line of code or thousands.
This shows things are roughly linear in commits, last quarter we were at 460 commits, now 970 and it is conceivable we could be around the same position as 2022 by the end of 2023.
Pull Requests
Finally, we have the MariaDB Server pull request metrics for the last quarter. This shows the newly opened PR count for the week, the number of closed but not merged and the number of merged. The final two columns show the all-time running total number of PRs and the number that were still open at the end of that week.
| Week Ending | New PRs | Closed PRs | Merged PRs | Total PRs | Still Open PRs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-03-12 | 19 | 0 | 11 | 2533 | 145 |
| 2023-03-19 | 14 | 3 | 0 | 2547 | 156 |
| 2023-03-26 | 15 | 8 | 5 | 2562 | 158 |
| 2023-04-02 | 14 | 10 | 14 | 2576 | 148 |
| 2023-04-09 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2580 | 150 |
| 2023-04-16 | 13 | 2 | 7 | 2593 | 154 |
| 2023-04-23 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 2600 | 148 |
| 2023-04-30 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 2608 | 149 |
| 2023-05-07 | 7 | 6 | 2 | 2615 | 148 |
| 2023-05-14 | 13 | 3 | 6 | 2628 | 152 |
| 2023-05-21 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2632 | 148 |
| 2023-05-28 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 2634 | 143 |
| 2023-06-04 | 15 | 2 | 7 | 2649 | 149 |
| 2023-06-11 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2654 | 151 |
Unfortunately the number of open pull requests has been slowly growing through 2023. Although this past quarter it has stayed roughly constant.
Next time
We are currently looking at more metrics to include, one of these is “time to meaningful first response” in the pull request metrics. This is being tracked in Jira ticket MDBF-572 and we welcome feedback on the current plan. If you have ideas for more metrics we could collect, or views you want to see in these posts, please let us know.
Image credit: Christiaan Colen, used under a CC-by-SA license.