Tag: PostgreSQL
-
The Man Who Benchmarks MariaDB Against the World
Jonathan Miller has spent 27 years in database performance testing. He talks about TAF, the open source Test Automation Framework that benchmarks MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL side by side, configuration provenance, and how to prove your patch made MariaDB faster.
-
Building a Public Performance Change Detection Library for MariaDB
Performance engineering inside a database project is usually private. Teams run internal workloads, investigate changes, fix issues, and move on. The knowledge stays inside the company, and the outside world only sees a benchmark graph or a release note.
I know this pattern well — I spent more than twenty‑six years doing this work for both PervasiveSQL and MySQL.
The investigations were deep, the lessons were real, but almost none of it was visible to the outside world.
The surprises, […]
-
MariaDB Foundation Adds PostgreSQL to Its Engine‑Agnostic Testing Framework (TAF).
The Test Automation Framework (TAF) was designed so that database makers themselves could create a plugin and integrate their database engine directly into the framework.
TAF provides the structure — lifecycle management, workload execution, profiling, reporting, and reproducible properties files — and each database plugin supplies the engine‑specific logic.
The first two plugins added to TAF were MariaDB and MySQL, proving the model: database vendors can plug their engine into TAF and immediately gain automated installs, structured workloads, concurrency sweeps, […]
-
Simple tool to build MariaDB commits for performance-change analysis
Tracking down changes in database performance is one of the hardest parts of engineering, especially when the change is buried somewhere in a long commit history.
To make this work easier and more repeatable, I put together a small but important tool:
MariaDBCommitBuilder.sh
This script does one thing well:
Given a commit hash, it checks out that commit, builds it cleanly, and packages it in a deterministic way so the Test Automation Framework (TAF) can run consistent performance tests.
Why […]
-
Database Trends: What is changing in the database world (besides AI)
Earlier this month, I had a half-hour chat with Kellyn Gorman, a Database and AI Advocate and Engineer at Redgate. The UK software company is known for database DevOps and database management tools most databases – and since 2024 as the owner of DB-Engines popularity Ranking of database management systems.
The chat was an intellectual pleasure, to say the least. Kellyn is outstandingly well informed on databases, with a background starting in Oracle, spanning most databases as a DBA and […]
-
The Real Operational Cost of Vacuuming in PostgreSQL
There was a time when PostgreSQL’s own developers were far more open about the real cost of their MVCC design. Back in the 8.1 era, the documentation spelled out the resource drain, the vacuum overhead, and the “cold comfort” of wraparound risk in plain language. I first read that line in 2003, and it stuck with me for more than twenty years. I could not imagine any serious operations team wanting a database that required a separate background process to […]
-
Making MariaDB the Natural Successor to MySQL
At the MariaDB Foundation, clarity of purpose matters. In an ecosystem as foundational as open-source databases, confidence is built not through slogans, but through predictability, restraint, and long-term commitment.
As I reflect upon what we learned in 2025 and how we can serve the database community in 2026, one thought stands out: MariaDB is the natural successor to MySQL, as Oracle loses its interest in the development of what has been the default Open Source Relational DBMS.
The MariaDB Foundation […]
-
MariaDB vs PostgreSQL: Understanding the Architectural Differences That Matter
This blog post is based on the YouTube presentation “MariaDB vs PostgreSQL: Technical Deep Dive | Architecture, Performance & Design Trade-offs” by Manoj Vakeel, part of MariaDB Foundation’s ongoing series exploring core database design choices and how they impact modern workloads.
The goal here is not to pick a “winner,” but to provide clear architectural insight for CTOs, database engineers, and system architects making decisions in 2025 and beyond.
“Both are powerful engines — both are proven in production — […]