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.

MariaDB.org page views increased by 77%

It is over a year since the overhauled MariaDB.org was published. We immediately got a lot of positive feedback and now looking at the statistics a year later we are glad to report that the number of visits has grown by 28% and the amount of page views has grown a whopping 77% from 1,1 million to 1,9 million. That is a significant acceleration in growth when one considers that the growth of page views the previous year (from 2014 to 2015) was only 7%. Some of the growth can surely be attributed to a general trend of MariaDB getting more adoption, but in particular the growth of page views (77%) and the decrease of bounces (-37%) and the average session duration increase from 1 minute to 1½ minutes can be attributed to the redesign. …