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. …

MariaDB 5.2.7 released!

Quick pointer that MariaDB 5.2.7 is now released. Highlights from the release notes: RHEL 5 RPMs (in addition to the CentOS 5 RPMs), and the inclusion of the HeidiSQL GUI client for the Windows MSI package. As always, the complete changelog, and what are you waiting for – download it now and give it a try!

Setting up MariaDB repositories for Debian/Ubuntu

If you run Debian or Ubuntu, and want a way to auto-generate a sources.list entry, then you should definitely look at: Setting up Repositories for Ubuntu/Debian. Its very simple: choose a distribution, then a release, then choose what version of MariaDB you would like to track and a mirror of your choice, and voila! it generates the sources.list for you.

SkySQL Roadshows – Seoul & Tokyo

A lot is happening in the world of MySQL lately. If you’re in Asia, SkySQL has been organising roadshows. On May 18, there was a captive audience in Singapore, listening to David Axmark (advisor to SkySQL, co-founder of MySQL Ab), Daniel Saito (SkySQL), and Colin Charles (Monty Program). On May 20, there was a huge audience in Manila, and I was totally bummed to have missed out on it.

I’m told there’s going to be an awesome audience tomorrow, May 27, in Seoul, South Korea. Lotte Hotel will be abuzz with all things SkySQL, Monty Program, and MariaDB, and it will feature Kaj Arno and Daniel Saito from SkySQL, and Colin Charles from Monty Program.

Looking for a Few Good Examples

In the #maria IRC channel the other day I fielded a question someone had about a DATETIME column where they wanted to SELECT by the year. The answer (which is probably obvious to many of you) is to use the YEAR() function like so:
select * from t1 where YEAR(d) = 2011;
(The above assumes the table is named “t1” and the DATETIME column is named “d”.)

In my reply I provided a link to the Date and Time Functions section of the AskMonty Knowledgebase, but when I looked at the entry for the YEAR() function, I noticed that the example given (which originated from the file scripts/fill_help_tables.sql which is found in the MySQL and MariaDB source) was not very helpful:
MariaDB [(none)]> …

Newsletters from the MariaDB dev meeting in Lisbon

Every morning before any of the meetings get started I print out a small one page newsletter which contains (among other things) the program for the day. Rather than keep them private, Colin suggested I post them here. I call the newsletter the “MariaDB Programador de Journal” which (I think) translates to “MariaDB Programmer’s Journal” in Portuguese.

[Updated, 13 Mar 2011, to add the newsletter for that day.]

At the meeting we’ve also been taking notes and posting them online for what improvements we want to make this year in MariaDB to make it even better. …

The AskMonty Knowledge Base – Open for editing

Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. …