A key feature of our new TokuDB v6.0 release, which I have been blogging about this week, is compression. Compression is always on in TokuDB, and the compression we’ve achieved in the past has been quite good. See a previous post on the 18x compression achieved by TokuDB v5.0 on one benchmark. In our latest release, we’ve updated the way compression works and got 50% improvement on compression.

I decided to present numbers on the same set of data as the old post, so see that post for experimental details.

But first, what are the changes? TokuDB compresses large blocks of data — on the order of MB, rather than the 16KB that InnoDB uses — …

Master/slave replication is an important tool that gets used in many ways: distributing read loads among many slaves for performance, using a slave for backups so the master can handle live load, geographically distributed disaster recovery, etc. The Achilles’ Heal of slave performance is that slave workloads are single-threaded. The master can have many clients inserting, updating, querying, whereas the slave has only one insertion client: the master. InnoDB single-client performance is much slower than its multi-client performance, which means that the bottleneck in a master/slave system is often the rate at which a slave can keep up.

If the master has an average transactions per second (tps) that is higher than what the slave can handle, the slave will fall further and further behind. If the slaves are being used to distribute read workload, for example, the results they produce will fall further out of date. If a slave is used to …

We are excited to announce TokuDB® v6.0, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

This version offers feature and performance enhancements over previous releases, support for XA (two-phase transactional commits), better compression, and reduced performance variability associated with checkpointing. This release also brings TokuDB support up to date on MySQL v5.1, MySQL v5.5 and MariaDB v5.2. There’s a lot of great technical stuff under the hood in this release and I’ll be reviewing the improvements one-by-one over the course of this week.

I’ll be posting more details about the new features and performance, so here’s an overview of what’s in store.

Replication Slave Lag

One of the things TokuDB does well is single-threaded insertions, which translates directly into less slave lag. With TokuDB v6.0, we introduce support for XA, which insures for …

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.6. This stable (GA) release incorporates MySQL 5.1.62, some performance improvements, and several bug fixes.

Most importantly, MariaDB 5.3.6 includes a fix for a bug which, under certain rare circumstances, allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.

• MariaDB 5.3.6 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.3.6 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.3.6 …

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.1.62 and MariaDB 5.2.12. Both of these stable (GA) releases incorporate MySQL 5.1.62 and several bug fixes.

Most importantly, MariaDB 5.1.62 and 5.2.12 include a fix for a bug that under certain rare circumstances allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.

Please see the What is MariaDB 5.1 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.1, and the What is MariaDB …

Update: MariaDB 5.1.62 and 5.2.12 have been released. They contain an important security fix.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.1.61 and MariaDB 5.2.11. Both of these stable (GA) releases incorporate MySQL 5.1.61 and several bug fixes.

Please see the What is MariaDB 5.1 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.1, and the What is MariaDB 5.2 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.2.

Sources, binaries, …

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.22-rc. MariaDB 5.5.22 is the first release candidate (RC) release in the 5.5 series and follows the MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha and 5.5.21-beta releases. We hope to follow it up soon with a Stable (GA) 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5 is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. Please see the What is MariaDB 5.5 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.5.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a Changelog available for those who are interested.

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We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.21-beta. MariaDB 5.5.21 is the first Beta release in the 5.5 series and follows the initial MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha release. We hope to follow it up soon with Release Candiate and then Stable (GA) 5.5 releases.

MariaDB 5.5.21 beta is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. In this release we have added some extra notable features including an improved thread pool, an updated SphinxSE storage engine for fulltext search, and the ability to selectively skip replication of binlog events. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into subsequent releases.

As with any beta release, MariaDB 5.5.21-beta should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some …

Following closely on the heels of the MariaDB 5.3.4-rc release a couple of weeks ago, the MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.5!

MariaDB 5.3.5 is the first stable (GA) release in the 5.3 series. Details and downloads are available from the following links:

• MariaDB 5.3.5 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.3.5 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.3.5 Downloads

(Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. A sources.list generator is available.)

About MariaDB 5.3

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We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases.

As with any alpha release, MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a  …