MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January 2024

It is the start of a new year, and with that brings the start of a new quarter, which means it is time for a contribution statistics update from us. I have lots of interesting data to walk you through this time, so let’s get started.

Year On Year Comparison

A good place to start would be to compare the previous year gone by with last year to see how we did. This table shows the number of organisations, contributors and commits to MariaDB Server in the last few years. The “Non-MariaDB” lines are contributors and commits by people who are not employed by MariaDB Plc or MariaDB Foundation.

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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Meaningful Response Metrics

There was a recent request by Eric Herman, the Chairperson of the MariaDB Foundation board, to add the time to first meaningful response for pull requests to the quarterly contributor metrics I generate and blog about. I thought this was a really good idea. There are a few problems with this, the first being the definition of “meaningful response”.

Meaningful Response

A “meaningful response” would likely be a response that adds value and shows that the pull request is being reviewed. The most accurate way to do this would be to manually record this using a set of criteria that defines what kind of responses are meaningful.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, June 2023

We are well into 2023 now, the time has really flown. There have already been two major versions of MariaDB Server that have reach GA, and with those, many new contributions. As with each quarterly metrics release, the raw data is available in our metrics repo, along with the scripts and configurations to generate it yourself.

Project Tracking

We are tracking multiple MariaDB related projects at the moment, many of which are pulled in when you build MariaDB Server. These include:

  • MariaDB Server – the server itself
  • libmarias3 – an open source library to talk to Amazon S3 and related block storage services.

MariaDB Contribution Statistics, March 2023

Due to a catalogue of issues our previous quarterly update for developer metrics was not published. This time, however, we have made quite a few changes. In this post, we will summarise 2022 and what has happened in the first couple of months of 2023. All the data for this blog post can be found in CSV format in the release section of the MariaDB Metrics repository, along with everything you need to generate the metrics yourself.

Changes to metrics gathering

For the main commit metrics, we use a tool called “GitDM” or Git Data Miner which was developed for the git kernel trees to group commits by people and organisations.

MariaDB metrics errors – a post-mortem

I’m going to start this blog post by saying that I made a mistake, a mistake that means all of the metrics blog posts so far have been made with erroneous data. As part of our openness value I will give a post-mortem of the issue here.

Metrics generation

Before we look into what went wrong, I first need to give a bit of background. The commit metrics are generated using a tool called “gitdm”, this is a “Git Data Miner” that was designed to generate commit statistics for the Linux Kernel. Our fork of this is in the metrics repository which includes some customisations that fit MariaDB Server’s needs better.

Contribution Statistics September 2022

Last month we provided contributor statistics for the last few years. We have had some fantastic feedback from this so today we are presenting you with another drop of contributor statistics for the last month. Normally we would be doing these quarterly but there are so many extra things to report that we decided to do a bonus one now.

Some key things have happened in the last month which affect the data, the first is that MariaDB 10.11 has had a preview release. Which means there has been a flurry of activity around this.