In June, I told about the consolidation of the MariaDB project tools. The final piece of this consolidation, to report bugs in the MariaDB project tracking tool called JIRA has now been finalized.

Bug reporting stays open! JIRA is open to anyone. The bug reports are publicly available, even without logging in and as a bonus it will be easier to follow what is going on in the project since you don’t have to jump between several tools to get the complete picture.

All bugs that existed in Launchpad have been migrated to JIRA. To find a bug that was originally reported on Launchpad use the following approaches:

• If you happen to have the original bug id you can search for the bug by typing lp:bugid into the search field in

We’re pleased to announce the first preview version of the Cassandra Storage Engine!

The Cassandra Storage Engine (SE) allows access to Cassandra databases from MariaDB/MySQL, and to provide data integration between the SQL and NoSQL worlds.

Have you ever needed to

• grab some of Cassandra’s data from your web frontend, or SQL query?
• insert a few records into Cassandra from some part of your app?

With Cassandra SE, this is easily possible. Cassandra SE makes Cassandra’s column families appear as MariaDB/MySQL tables that you can insert to, update, and select from. You can perform joins on Cassandra data, or againist data in Cassandra and data in MariaDB.

Today we’re releasing a source tarball, as

Infor announced this week, that they will provide open source database alternatives to some of their products. MariaDB has been chosen, tested, and certified by Infor to be the open source database of choice (together with MySQL) for the Infor LN and ION products. Infor LN is Infor’s flagship ERP and is sometimes better known by its former name, Baan. It has 25 years of manufacturing know-how built into it and is used by more than 5,000 companies worldwide in a wide range of industries. These include automotive, industrial equipment and machinery, high tech and electronics, and aerospace and defense. This is a big stamp of approval that even the most critical systems can be run on MariaDB.

In other news, there are currently several really interesting paths coming together into some important

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:

• About the EXPLAIN

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. We had pretty strict policies about it in MySQL AB (and, later, Sun Microsystems) — every new bug fix always had to come with a test case for the bug. And because these tests were always run on many platforms for every push (by the continuous integration tool called Pushbuild — developed in-house by

In end of May I told about the numbering plans for the next version of MariaDB in the blog post What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?. We received quite a lot of feedback and criticism on the idea of calling the next version MariaDB 10.0. Here is a little more information about why it makes sense to call the next version 10.0.

This is not news for most of you. MariaDB is not just a set of patches applied on top of MySQL. MariaDB includes features which are similar to the corresponding features in MySQL, but the implementations differ, like for example the thread pool, microsecond support and query

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

This week we present the 100th episode (yes, we started at episode 0), which is part 1 of a 2 part interview with XKCD's Randall Munroe.

OurSQL Podcast history
Episode 0 was on November 26, 2006.
Episode 26 on December 16, 2010 added Sarah Novotny as the first co-host and we hired our audio engineer and producer, Rich Goyette, due to the support of Justin Kestelyn and the Oracle Technology Network.

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A screencast about the MariaDB release process.

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links mentioned in the video:

• The MariaDB homepage
• The AskMonty Knowledgebase
• Southeast Linux Fest
• Buildbot
• The MariaDB Buildbot
• The MariaDB Tools project on Launchpad
• The MariaDB Downloads page
• The maria-discuss mailing list on Launchpad
• MariaDB on

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: http://mariadb.org/jira) we can

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

We haven’t posted any Windows benchmarks for a while, and MariaDB for Windows contains some specific improvements which might not be widely know since we haven’t talked much about them yet. This post is an attempt to fix that. We’ll also share current MySQL 5.5 numbers.

My setup is an 8 core 2 socket server (yes, a little bit dated for today, but it is the best machine I have at my disposal), 10K SAS disks with RAID1. I ran sysbench 0.4 single table / 1,000,000 records. I ran the benchmark over a network, with the number of concurrent clients ranging from 4 to 4096.

Here is what OLTP-readonly throughput looks like:

• For most of the tests, MariaDB’s throughput is approx 10% higher than MySQL’s
• For 4096

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. There were also many

This week we talk about numeric data types in MySQL.

News/Events/Feedback
OurSQL Listener Jesper Hansen was nice enough to take a screen shot of episode 0 of the ourSQL podcast hitting 12,345 downloads.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free) (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/events/innovation-day/). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

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In this episode we talk about string data types, comparing them to the ISO:2003 SQL standard.

Gerry has joined Tokutek - Congrats Gerry! We interviewed Martin from Tokutek in episode 86.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

read more

The explain statement can be an important tool for understanding how a query is being executed and what you can do to make it run better.  Although the output of EXPLAIN is relatively straightforward it can be confusing to inexperienced users or can be mangled by terminal wrapping.

To help with these problems as well as provide a pastebin for MariaDB developers to share explains during development we created The MariaDB/MySQL Explain Analyzer. This tool:

This is the

This week we present how to use pt-archiver and pt-find, two Percona Toolkit tools. We focus on the common usage of the tools and the gotchas we ran into using them.

News/Events/Feedback
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

read more

This week we talk about MariaDB - explaining features, and comparing to Percona's patched MySQL and Oracle's MySQL. MariaDB is touted as "a better MySQL, not a different MySQL". MariaDB is the 2nd most popular open source database, even more popular than Postgres.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

read more

On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

MariaDB seals

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that

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.

• MariaDB 5.5.23 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.5.23 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.5.23 Downloads

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

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 Downloads

Please see the