MariaDB Server turns fifteen!

Fifteen years ago, Internet Explorer made up about two-thirds of all browsers, Firefox the majority of the rest, while a newly-released browser called Chrome was starting to appear in the rankings.

Fifteen years ago, iPhone OS overtook Windows Mobile in worldwide smartphone market share, but still trailed the giants of Blackberry’s RIM and Symbian, used by market leader Nokia, while Google’s new Android ecosystem was just starting to show signs of momentum.

And in the database world, as Oracle moved to acquire MySQL, a new upstart called MariaDB was born as a fork of MySQL, birthed by MySQL founder Monty Widenius with the support of many of the original MySQL developers.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024

Another quarter year has gone by, and in the world of MariaDB, it is time for another contributions report. The raw data for this report can be found on GitHub, here.

Server contributions

Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server so far this year.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
MariaDB Plc 29 1262
MariaDB Foundation 6 123
Codership 7 77
Independent 17 57
Amazon 12 50
Arch Linux 1 6
GSoC 3 5
IONOS 1 4
Alibaba 1 3
Rakuten 1 3
HardenedBSD 1 2
OpenBSD 1 2
University of Sydney 1 2
Arm 1 1
Chainguard 1 1
ClearCode 1 1
FreeBSD 1 1
IBM 1 1

MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 8th October 2024

There have been some interesting things to note here.

MariaDB Foundation assisting multiple vendors

I recently helped two of our sponsors simultaneously, DBS Bank and MariaDB Plc, with a recent issue they were experiencing. This actually helped us add support for an extra cloud vendor. But before I tell the story, I first need to give a bit of background.

S3 Engine History

Back in 2019, we added the S3 engine to MariaDB Server. “S3” stands for “Simple Storage Service”, it was developed by Amazon, and it is pretty much the standard for storing objects (typically files) in the cloud. Almost every cloud vendor has their own object storage with an S3-compatible REST API.

MariaDB Server is “main” by default

We recently had a public vote on whether “main” or a version branch should be the default. The results in favour of “main” were very clear. It has been just over a month, but behind the scenes we have been laying the groundwork for this to happen.

We think we are as ready as we can be, so with the opening of development for 11.7, we have switched to “main” as the default branch for MariaDB Server. This means that all new feature development should now target the “main” branch when contributing to MariaDB Server.

MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main”

On the 3rd of July, two weeks ago, I created a poll to ask about the future of feature development branches in MariaDB Server. Specifically, whether we should switch to a rolling model which is more familiar to users of services such as GitHub.

The votes we received gave a very clear result. Today I will share the conclusions we drew, as well as setting expectations for what will happen next.

Recap: what is this “main” branch all about?

In a rolling model, there is one main branch of the tree that all the feature commits go into (typically called “main”), and this is then forked when it is time to prepare a major release.

MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Have your say

Many countries in the world right now are hosting elections, in fact, my own country’s election is tomorrow. MariaDB Foundation is also asking for you to make one more vote on our own kind of referendum.

We have recently had a request by a member of the community to change how we use GitHub, in a way that, in-theory, will make things easier for community contributors. I’ll explain the current situation, the proposal and then the poll.

Current situation

At the moment, if you want to develop a new feature for MariaDB Server, it needs to be developed against the latest version branch, which is the default branch when you view on GitHub.

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.