Post-mortem: PHP and MariaDB Docker issue

Years ago, I watched a film with my children (now adults themselves) called Meet the Robinsons. A running theme from the film is that it is OK to make mistakes because it is from those mistakes we can learn and “keep moving forward”.

An unfortunate perfect storm of several problems occurred which meant that on the 21st February 2024, the mariadb:latest Docker image would not work with PHP and NodeJS clients. Now, one of the things I helped introduce into the MariaDB Foundation is the concept of doing post-mortems, not just when things go wrong but when they go right too.

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.