MariaDB ServerFest Berlin 17 Sep 2024

Come join us in Berlin, on Tue 17 Sep 2024! It’s time for our next MariaDB Server Fest, which we invite you to enjoy in person or virtually.

MariaDB Server Fests are the events where MariaDB Foundation and friends celebrate and share the latest new happenings in the world of MariaDB Server. And Berlin is a great place to be – to work in, to travel to, to meet in.

Welcome to Berlin!

The physical event is hosted by MariaDB Foundation’s valued sponsor IONOS, on Revaler Straße 30 in the vibrant and trendy Friedrichshain area of Berlin. We kindly request participants in the in-person event to turn up by 9:30. The links for registration are online. The event is free of charge.

The Berlin event will be broadcast live from 10:00 to 17:00 CEST. We will publish the link to the broadcast stream in due course.

The schedule with links to individual presentations is also live. Allow me to highlight a few of the core themes:

It’s all about MariaDB Vector – GenAI in a standard Open Source RDBMS

The newest aspect of MariaDB Server is our Vector offering. We just released a Vector Preview release, which will be part of the upcoming MariaDB 11.7 release.

Our claim is that the vectors used by Generative AI belong in industry-standard relational DBMSes. Why? You can easily combine vector data with other data in a single query, which isn’t possible with dedicated vector databases. Moreover, RDBMSes like MariaDB have all the tooling to make intermediate results visible and auditable. We also claim that the vectors used by Gen AI belong in an Open Source database, like any other data.

At the Server Fest, Sergei Golubchik, Server Architect, MariaDB plc will talk about MariaDB Vector, a new Open Source vector database that you are already familiar with. Sergei will describe the new syntax and functionality, and explain how MariaDB gives control to its users through offering vectors in its standard Open Source edition, not in extensions, cloud versions or proprietary editions.

It’s all about migration and compatibility – with MySQL Server, with Oracle Database and more

Compatibility is a recurring theme of MariaDB Server. Upgrading from MySQL to a new MariaDB is often easier than upgrading to a new MySQL, in particular MySQL 8.0 and later. Nothing is more compatible. You can even skip upgrading to intermediate versions.

Historically, MariaDB is a mature extended fork of MySQL. It’s near plug-in compatible with MySQL, it’s fully open source, it’s more performant, and adds plenty of functionality on top.

At the Server Fest, Michael “Monty” Widenius, Founder of both MySQL and MariaDB, will detail his thoughts in his Migration Overview. For years, MariaDB has had the most complete Oracle syntax of all Open Source RDBMSes. You can seamlessly combine the rich functionality of MariaDB Server with its built-in Oracle syntax, including PL/SQL procedures. Monty will share how migrating to MariaDB frees users of proprietary databases, such as Oracle, from high license costs and vendor lock-in, making them masters of their own data.

It’s all about Stability, Performance, and Ease of Use

MariaDB Foundation values stability (maintained bug-fix branches, frequent long term support releases), performance (with a preference for public benchmarks), and ease of use (short time from installation to usage, easy upgrades, easy replication, backward compatibility, pre-built packages and containers for Linux distributions).

In this area, we have many presentations.

Kristian Nielsen, Chief Replication Architect at MariaDB Foundation, talks about MariaDB Replication – Fantastically Flexible and Fragile
Michael “Monty” Widenius and Vicențiu Ciorbaru, Chief Development Officer at MariaDB Foundation, talk about MariaDB Catalogs, followed by Christian Roser of IONOS coming with a user perspective in Reducing overhead with MariaDB Catalogs
Federico Razzoli is a frequent presenter, in Berlin showing how to Unlock data change analysis with Temporal Tables and Window Functions
Lukas Vileikis is a long-time MariaDB user, a database guru and a security expert, and his presentation is called MariaDB Indexes Revisited: Beyond the Documentation
Nikita Malyavin of MariaDB plc presents the New authentication plugin: PARSEC

It’s all about Openness and Contributions

We at MariaDB Foundation take pride in pointing out that MariaDB is open. And we don’t just mean the GPLv2 licensing, we mean the development model. We mean a public bug list and a public roadmap on Jira. We have open discussions on our free-to-join chat system Zulip. We host an editable knowledge base.

MariaDB is actively encouraging contributions from both big institutional contributors (eg. Amazon, Alibaba, Intel) and smaller organisations and individuals. MariaDB has been part of Google Summer of Code for 13 years.

To underline our openness, we start the event with Google Summer of Code student Andre Alves presenting Generalized Triggers and my experience contributing to MariaDB during GSoC
Hard-core developers have come to appreciate Marko Mäkelä’s deep dives, this time into the Efficient Use of rr to Analyze and Fix MemorySanitizer Errors

MariaDB plc has just released MaxScale 21.06 as GPL. Inspired by this, we have two MaxScale presentations from our friends at MariaDB plc.