The 2 year old MariaDB

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). …

MariaDB Crash Course

Ben Forta, the author of MySQL Crash Course and Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, has written what I believe is the first MariaDB-specific book: MariaDB Crash Course. I just received word from Ben that the book is now shipping.

Most MySQL books can, of course, be used to learn almost everything you need to know about using MariaDB. But with all of the features and abilities MariaDB has gained in the MariaDB 5.2 and MariaDB 5.3 releases, it’s nice there is now a book specific to MariaDB. …

MariaDB 5.3.1 beta released!

It has arrived, a little over a month from the last beta release, is MariaDB 5.3.1. It is a bug-fix update and as always the changelog lists everything that has been fixed. The release notes list all the changes present in the 5.3-series.

Many fixes are in the optimizer updates that showed itself in MariaDB 5.3.0-beta, plus backports from the MySQL 5.6 feature preview trees. Microsoft Windows is also important to the MariaDB project so there are plenty of updates for that platform. What are you waiting for, download it now.

MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform

About Jelastic:

Jelastic is the next generation of Java Platforms as a Service.

Unlike previous cloud platforms, Jelastic:

  • Can run any Java application and so does not require developers to change their code or get locked-into the platform,
  • Can scale any application up and down by automatically adding or removing memory and CPU units depending on the application load,
  • Takes all configuration and management worries away: developers simply specify the application stack and database options they need and Jelastic creates, configures, and maintains the environment for them
  • Supports a wide range of application server stacks including Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, and GlassFish
  • Out of the box, allows users to get a preconfigured instance of MariaDB up and running and available to the application.

Quick distribution update: openSUSE, Gentoo

If you’re on openSUSE, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest MariaDB release made on 19/07/2011. Previous security fix disabled XtraDB! This is MariaDB 5.1.55.

If you’re using Gentoo, please test MariaDB 5.2 ebuilds in the MySQL overlay. Its current with MariaDB 5.2.7 as well as MariaDB 5.1.55.

MariaDB is at OSCON

The MariaDB Project is at OSCON 2011. We’ve got a booth, and we plan to also have a BoF session: Wednesday 27 July 2011 at room E142 at 8pm.

There will as usual be lots of black vodka (there was some yesterday at the MySQL BoF as well), and we’re going to talk about and celebrate the release of MariaDB 5.3.0 beta.

Come drop by the booth… we clearly have an interesting booth giveaway. And feel free to say hi to Kurt von Finck, Michael “Monty” Widenius, or Colin Charles who will be present, walking around, etc.

Progress Reporting in MariaDB 5.3

There are many new features in MariaDB 5.3. I’m looking forward to many of them, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is Progress Reporting.

It’s a fact of life in the database world that some commands take longer to run than others. Commands like ALTER TABLE, LOAD DATA INFILE, and adding and dropping an index simply take time to run, depending (of course) on your data and schema. I always have hated having to wait for those commands to run with no indication of how much progress has been made or how much is left to do. …

OLX and MariaDB

OLX, a free classifieds site, is serving up 40 million pages a day using MariaDB. Not an insignificant task.

There’s a nice write-up in the MariaDB knowledgebase with particulars. In short, the 5.2 series of MariaDB and some of the unique features of the project have made a migration easy and valuable.

It’s nice to hear such stories. Both because we like interesting sites and projects, as well as our natural interest in larger scale or larger visibility deployments. Got a story to share? Please create a KB entry, or e-mail the community team. …