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.

Announcing the MariaDB Vector Bounty Program!

Today, we are excited to announce a new fund to help give MariaDB Vector a high-quality integration into as many LLM frameworks as possible. This means that you can get rewarded for integrating MariaDB Vector into a known framework! This program will run until the end of February 2025.

How it will work

  1. Pick a framework: You need to pick one of the frameworks from the list curated by Qdrant that you would like to work on adding MariaDB Vector support to.
  2. Contact us: Contact us on the MariaDB Zulip, in the General channel, just create a topic.

Intel improving the performance of MariaDB Vector

As you have probably seen in earlier posts, the preview version of MariaDB Vector is out and ready for you to play with. We have had input from several different places during the development of this feature. This, of course, includes hardware manufacturers such as Intel.

In the background, Intel have been prototyping using AVX512 instructions for dot product and bloom filter. Both of these are functions are part of vector searches. If you haven’t heard of these terms, let me try and break them down.

AVX-512 – 512-bit extensions to the Intel Advanced Vector Extension

The AVX512 instructions themselves are CPU specific instructions that are designed to run calculations on large vectors of numbers simultaneously.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team

Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector

Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.