MariaDB Server will be the default database in cPanel

Good news! cPanel, one of the leading control panels in the hosting world has just announced that they are going to make MariaDB Server the default database when installing new cPanel instances. This change is slated to occur in version 122 of cPanel & WHM, coming in Q3 of 2024. We at MariaDB Foundation are very happy about this decision and are looking forward to continuous collaboration, to the benefit of our users and the MariaDB Server project.

We think that this is a great decision for cPanel users because we at MariaDB have stayed true to the original values of MySQL, including:

  • Long term backwards compatibility
  • Painless upgrades and ease of use
  • Long term stable releases;

Attending Percona University in Athens 2023

It’s been a while since we posted about community organised events. I’m happy to have the chance to talk about my experience attending Percona University in Athens.

For those in a hurry, the main topics are:
1. Databases in the cloud, why vendor-lock is important to consider.
2. How to build Open Source databases, FerretDB and TiDB, two completely different approaches.
3. Upgrading from MySQL 5.7, monitoring and AI to speed up things.

On the left we have Ananias Tsalouchidis, who gave a talk on upgrading from MySQL 5.7

Seeing familiar faces, discussing database experiences

When working within the MariaDB Foundation, it isn’t always easy to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2023

We are in October, which means it has been 4 months since the last metrics report. It is, therefore, time for another quarterly metrics report (plus a bit more). The extra month was to allow for an announcement which is a prerequisite for this post, and it also means we are more or less aligned to real quarters. The major changes to this will come in the second half of this post, we have lots of additional data for pull requests. With that, let’s get started.

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MariaDB Coding Standards

Coding standards are often as hotly debated as vim vs emacs and other developer arguments. Viewers of the show Silicon Valley will all know the “tabs vs spaces” scene and how passionate people can be about it. Whilst I do personally have a preference (I’m not sharing it here), I feel it is much more important that people stick to one standard for a code base.

Standards Story

Several months ago a new community developer for MariaDB Server sent me a message asking where to find our coding standards document. After a bit of searching I realised we did not have one, and if we want to onboard new developers we definitely should have one.

Code of Conduct Update

Back in December, we asked for your feedback on implementing a code of conduct in the MariaDB Server community. We have seen some great feedback and observations from this and today we are have published version 1.0 of our code of conduct.

Feedback

The feedback we have received has been generally positive both when it comes to implementing a code of conduct in general, and to the content of the text.

That said, it was suggested by Brian Andrus that we better define “inflammatory language”; this is something we actually discussed internally prior to the draft content.

This one trick can make MariaDB 30x faster!

Yes, it is a bit of a click-bait title, but in this case running one SQL command did improve a community user’s performance by that much. It could help you too.

The story

A community user posted in a couple of places that when migrating a large WordPress installation to MariaDB that they were seeing a certain query performing terribly. The query was taking 1.5 seconds to execute and it was clear from the explain plan that the optimizer was not making an ideal decision about the join order.

The query was generated by WordPress so it would not be easy to force an index, or rewrite the query.

Regressions in recent MariaDB Server releases

Our most recent MariaDB Server release introduced some regressions starting with the 10.6 series, affecting 10.7 – 10.9 as well. This blog post is here to explain the problems in hopes that the impact is minimized. We are likely going to release a new version of MariaDB correcting these problems soon.

InnoDB Full Text Index on tables causes an assertion error (MDEV-29342)

There was a bug in the InnoDB Storage Engine where the full text index could go out of sync with the actual table data. This would happen when only one new row was inserted between the last InnoDB sync (which happens asynchronously) and a server shutdown.

The Path to Code Contributions in MariaDB Server

I have been working for the MariaDB Foundation as the Chief Contributions Officer for a couple of weeks and it is fantastic being part of the MariaDB family again. Part of my job is to help the community massage pull requests into something that we can merge. I am, however, finding that one of the worst parts of my job is having to say “no” to contributions that clearly took a lot of time and effort on the part of the developer.

Contributions could be turned down or at least will require changes for a number of reasons.