MariaDB Galera Cluster Alpha immediately available

Today we’re pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB Galera Cluster!

With this release, we’re addressing the numerous requests we’ve received over the past few months for a MariaDB-based Galera Cluster. MariaDB, the more reliable, performant, feature-complete & backwards compatible MySQL database becomes even more attractive by making it available for Galera Cluster.

What is it?

  • A straight merge of MariaDB 5.5.25 with Galera Cluster by Codership
  • An alpha release which should not be used in production environments
  • Using the Galera replication methodology, users get:
    • Synchronous, multi-master replication with guaranteed data consistency
    • This solution provides both read &

The Explain Analyzer and HeidiSQL

A few months ago we announced the EXPLAIN Analyzer, a simple tool to help you understand how MariaDB / MySQL was running queries. For users of HeidiSQL this is now even easier. As discussed in their news post you can now send a query to the EXPLAIN analyzer with a single click.

We hope this helps both new and experienced users better understand the queries they run.

More information about the EXPLAIN Analyzer and the simple API client authors can use to add support to their apps is available in the AskMonty Knowledgebase:

Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL just become closed source?

About a week ago I was looking at MySQL 5.5.27, and noticed a curious thing. Despite the fact that the new MySQL release contained its usual share of bug fixes, not a single one of them was accompanied with a test case.

Now, let me tell you something about tests. For many years MySQL was using its own testing framework, called mysql-test. The first version was written as early as 1999. Over the years it has accumulated a lot of tests. Tests for new features and regression tests — those that guarantee that a bug, once fixed, will never ever show up again. …

The Query Cache and Partitions

Like others we were not satisfied with the fix for a bug in MySQL which caused the query cache and partitioning to not work reliably together. The bug, in simple terms, was that if the query cache was enabled and you used partitioned tables and if a partitioned table was using a transactional engine like InnoDB or XtraDB, the query cache could, under certain circumstances, return incorrect results.

Returning incorrect results is a definite, high-priority bug. However, the upstream fix was to disable all caching of queries from partitioned tables. We wanted a better solution because the query cache can be very useful and beneficial for partitioned tables, just like it is useful and beneficial for non-partitioned tables. …

Consolidating MariaDB project tools

It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: https://mariadb.org/jira) we can report bugs, have future plans, and also give users a roadmap which is pretty cool. …

Monty Program & SkySQL: a statement on the serious security vulnerability that was found in MariaDB and MySQL

Over the past few days extensive conversations around a new security vulnerability in MariaDB and MySQL have taken place.

It all started as a chain reaction when Monty Program publicly disclosed information about the flaw they had found and about how to make sure your MariaDB and MySQL installations can be fixed. The initial information got assigned the security vulnerabitlity identifier CVE-2012-2122 and the contents can be seen e.g. here http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/493.

The bug was found two months ago on April 4th.

Before disclosing the information publicly, given the seriousness of this bug and considering the millions of MySQL and MariaDB installations deployed worldwide, Monty Program informed the biggest distributors of MySQL and MariaDB as a precaution. …

What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. …

Announcing MariaDB 5.5.23 GA

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.23. This stable (GA) release incorporates MariaDB 5.3.6 and MySQL 5.5.23, some performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Please see the What is MariaDB 5.5 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.5.

Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our network of MariaDB mirrors. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. We have a sources.list generator for creating sources.list entries. …