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 5.2 page for an overview of 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, and package downloads are available from our

This week we talk about package and configuration management with MySQL.

News/Events:
Don't forget to send us questions to answer for future versions of Ear Candy, see the "Feedback" section below.

There are 2 free webcasts on Efficiently deploying new MySQL applications on Windows coming up: in French on Thursday April 5th and in German, on Thursday, April 19th.

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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.

Sources,

When I published the MariaDB-5.3.4 sysbench results I said “if your workload includes complex (sub)queries, then you will probably benefit more from MariaDBs new optimizer features”. Today I will present some benchmark results for complex workload.

The benchmark is DBT3, an implementation of the TPC-H specification. DBT3 is written in C and hosted at Sourceforge.

The DBT3 benchmark can run at different scale factors – defining the size of the database. I used a scale factor of 30 which yields ~30GB of raw data and ~48GB of disk footprint. The machine running the benchmark had 16G of memory.

InnoDB has the problem of fluctuating table statistics, leading to rather unpredictable query plans. For this reason the

A screencast demonstrating the MariaDB Windows installer.

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

Some links:

• The MariaDB homepage
• The AskMonty Knowledgebase
• The MariaDB Downloads page
• Installing MariaDB on Windows documentation
• The HeidiSQL homepage

Acknowledgments:

A big thanks to Vladislav Vaintroub, MariaDB’s Windows guru, and to Rasmus Johansson for help with the screencast.

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

News:
Oracle will be at DrupalCon in Denver, CO from Monday, March 19th through Friday, March 23rd.

Percona's XtraDB cluster announcement
XtraDB Cluster at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup on Wednesday, March 21st
XtraDB Webinar on Wednesday April 4th

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Here’s another MariaDB screencast, this time highlighting some of the GIS functionality in MariaDB.

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

Some links and notes:

• GIS Functionality in MariaDB
• Data used in this screencast
• OpenJUMP
• JUMP database plugin
  • To use the database plugin, unpack it into the OpenJUMP lib/ext/ directory (not a subdirectory, but directly into that directory). Also place the mysql-connector-java.jar into the lib/ext/ directory.

Acknowledgments:

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

The MariaDB 5.3 series introduces many new features,

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 

News/Feedback:
This week we have some fun audio feedback from Patrick Hurley, a MySQL DBA in the UK.

The Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th. The conference is at the Santa Clara, CA Convention Center. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012. Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!. Check out the tutorial and session schedule.

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Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:

Some notes:

• The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
• As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user. I choose to do it in the video, but you don’t need to. If you leave the password field blank the root password will not be changed. Other database users are preserved, of course.
• As with any database upgrade, before doing this to a production system you should have backups and test.

Links:

Links shown or mentioned

The MySQL community has something new on their radar. First up, it looks like MySQL is now part of Oracle Software Security Assurance, and this is something all MySQL users should be happy about. Next, it is worth noting that MySQL is now part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (Oracle CPU), as the MySQL product line has made it into its first Oracle CPU advisory for January 2012.

As part of the MySQL community, CPU’s are new to us — they are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October. This kind of reminds us of Patch Tuesday, but let’s not digress.

This

In this primer I will show how to improve the security of your MariaDB installation by using two-step verification and how to use it from your Windows GUI client.

Let’s suppose you have your data in MariaDB, installed, say, on Ubuntu. And your users connect to it to run ad hoc queries, using some sort of a Windows GUI client. You don’t want them to write the access password on post-it notes or have it auto-entered by the client. And you don’t want anyone see the password when one of the salespersons connects to the mother ship from his laptop in the Internet café. So you decide to use the two-step verification, just like Google does, to secure the access to the data.

If you don’t know what a “two-step verification” is, see, for example, this introductory

This week we play a bunch of bloopers, some you have heard, some you haven't, as our year-end gift to you. We hope these make you laugh!

Sugus candy

This week, we continue our discussion about MySQL and its forks. We discuss the Percona server and MariaDB.

Percona Live comes to Washington, DC on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There is a 50% discount for students, faculty and staff of educational organizations, and a 35% discount for government employees. http://www.percona.com/live/dc-2012/

Percona Server
Percona software

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Parts of the world are already celebrating Christmas Eve and it’s time to relax and spend time with family and friends. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas this is when there is time for less work. Here are a few words to round off MariaDB’s current state and where it’s heading.

This year culminated in MariaDB 5.3.3, the release candidate of 5.3. This is a significant release that makes years of work available by default in the database server. Earlier releases still required features to be explicitly switched on, but thanks to thorough testing assuring the quality of the new functionality we have now enabled them. It’s still called a release candidate which means it’s ready for general usage, but we want more user feedback before calling it stable. Make yourself familiar with the MariaDB

We have lately been talking about some upcoming features that we feel are important to MariaDB users, because the corresponding ones that will be provided with MySQL will be incompatible with MariaDB and closed source.

We’re happy to announce the following:

• The next version of MariaDB, version 5.2.10 will include an open source PAM Authentication Plugin. MariaDB 5.2.10 is scheduled for release next week.
• A Windows Authentication Plugin is in development and QA currently and will be part of MariaDB 5.2.11, which is scheduled for release before Christmas.
• MariaDB 5.5 will include both of the above plugins and an open source thread pool implementation. The soon-to-be-launched first version however will not include the thread pool.

Stay tuned for more information

I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.

I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices

The Caryatids on the south porch of the Erechtheion (420 BC), Athens, Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. Monty Program is a virtual company with employees

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak.

Asking lots and lots of people to fill out surveys isn’t any fun, and we would have to keep repeating the survey ad nauseum to get useful information over time on trends and

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. Specifically, /var/run has been moved to /run (a discussion of the rationale behind the move can be found

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). It was missing basic functionality that one can expect in any 2010s relational database. Things like hash joins or efficient handling of subqueries.

We’ve also wanted to gradually make MariaDB better at handling

Posted recently on the maria-developers mailing list, by Igor Babaev, Principal MariaDB developer at Monty Program is some interesting preliminary results for MariaDB 5.3.0 benchmarked against the DBT-3 benchmarking program.

DBT-3 is a benchmark to test a decision support workload, with a suite of business-oriented queries and concurrent data modifications.

Read Igor’s discoveries, which he ran on a laptop with 4 cores (multi-threaded = 8 cores in total), 8GB RAM and SSD on SuSE, and as Igor says, enjoy his numbers. It is a repeatable benchmark with all settings included. We’d like to see discussion continued on the