SkySQL has signed a merger agreement with Monty Program Ab, creators of the popular MariaDB database. Read more about it, as it features important tidbits from Patrik Sallner (CEO, SkySQL Ab), Simon Phipps (CEO, MariaDB Foundation), and Michael “Monty” Widenius (CTO, MariaDB Foundation).

A key takeaway is that SkySQL will work alongside & collaborate closely with the MariaDB Foundation, plus continue to invest in the development of the MariaDB server.

This is a nice blog post from Asher Feldman, Site Architect, Wikipedia on how Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB. If you’re using English or German Wikipedia, or using Wikidata, you’re currently being served by MariaDB 5.5.

MariaDB is very happy to be accepted as a project in the Google Summer of Code 2013. This will be our first year participating and we’re stoked that we’re one of the accepted organizations. We have an ideas list as always, and we’re expecting to get some great mentors & students to hack on some new code for the MariaDB project (which now comprises not just the server, but Galera Cluster as well as the connectors). Watch this space for more information, but if you’re interested in hacking on MySQL, MariaDB, Galera Cluster or some of the Percona toolkit, and it’s a summer’s worth of work, this should be a lot of fun!

Team MariaDB will be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013, held in Santa Clara from April 22-25 2013. We will also be at the SkySQL Solutions Day held on April 26 2013 at the same venue, the Hyatt Santa Clara. We have talks, a booth in the DotOrg Pavilion, have a BoF and we’re participating in the passport program.

Team MariaDB talks:

MariaDB 5.5 is now inside of OpenBSD, the free, functional & secure OS. The work started a few weeks ago, and now you can get MariaDB via the ports tree. And yes, it will replace the current MySQL 5.1 that ships in the next release.

MariaDB has had pluggable authentication since MariaDB 5.2. Our most popular authentication plugin that we ship in MariaDB is the PAM authentication plugin. Naturally one is curious to see if users would like to see more authentication plugins being made available, so we’ve posted a poll on Facebook. Please feel free to add your vote to the poll so we have a better idea of where to focus our future pluggable authentication development.

Two bits of good news for MariaDB users from the distribution standpoint this week:

• Slackware Linux is dropping MySQL for MariaDB as a default
• Arch Linux replaces MySQL in repositories with MariaDB

Congratulations to the openSUSE community on a successful release of openSUSE 12.3. A highlight worth mentioning is that MariaDB is now the default as opposed to MySQL. What are you waiting for, download it!

From the features list, here’s an excerpt focusing on MariaDB & MySQL:

openSUSE has moved from MySQL to MariaDB as default. MariaDB was first shipped with openSUSE 11.3 back in 2010. Over the years it proved itself and starting with 12.3 openSUSE is replacing default MySQL implementation with MariaDB. This means that whole distribution is compiled against MariaDB and in ‘M’ in LAMP means MariaDB from now. As

Alongside SkySQL, we participate in SkySQL & MariaDB Meetups. These events are free to attend and you’ll get to meet & speak with SkySQL CEO Patrik Sallner and all round MariaDB man (& MySQL creator) Michael “Monty” Widenius. 

If you’re at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Santa Clara (many of us from Team MariaDB are speaking), you should consider spending the extra day there as on Friday April 26 2013, there exists the

We released the release candidate for MariaDB Galera Cluster on 21st December 2012, not traditionally the best time to make a release. We want to make this a GA release soon and we also want to ensure its well tested. Download it. Read the release notes. Give us feedback/report bugs.  Blog about it too!

It seems there’s lot of activity in Barcelona, Spain in the coming weeks. Lenz Grimmer talks about speaking at LinuxCon Europe (Nov 5-9), where the conference really runs from Nov 5-7. I’m happy to be speaking about MariaDB on the 5th. Monty Program & SkySQL are joint-booth-sponsors of this event, so expect there to be a presence for Q&A at the booths.

While I wish I can stay on for the meetup organized by Giuseppe

If you’re interested in MariaDB & MySQL and happen to be in Tokyo, do drop by the first ever MariaDB/MySQL Tokyo Meetup #1.

It happens October 16 2012, from 18.00-20.00. It is graciously hosted at K.K.Ashisuto (HQ) Salon Space (2nd floor). We have maps in Japanese and English.

See you there!

It has been a long time since I’ve been to Manila, so we’re happy to have a meetup group there with the hopes of turning it regular. If you’re in the Makati area of metro Manila on Tuesday, September 11 2012 at 7pm, feel free to come to the first MariaDB/MySQL Meetup in Manila. RSVP and I hope to see you next Tuesday.

Things are definitely a little quieter here in MariaDB land as many people embark on summer vacations to rest and recharge. However we will be at OSCON 2012. We have a booth in the non-profit/projects pavilion, amazing amounts of schwag, and the famous black vodka that Monty always brings with him. We plan to have a BoF on Thursday evening (come to D135 at 8pm), and we will be at the MySQL BoF on Wednesday evening as well, just for good measure.

Come say hi. Come tell us how you’re using MariaDB. Come tell us what you want from MariaDB. Come tell us why you switched. Or what we can do to make you switch. It should be all round fun.

See you next week!

If you’re not on the announce mailing list (low traffic) or following us on Facebook, you’ve missed the announcement of MariaDB 5.5.24 (release notes, changelog). Highlights include:

• Includes all changes up to MariaDB 5.3.7 and MySQL 5.5.24
• We’re providing RPM packages for RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6, as well as a YUM repository
• Ubuntu 12.04 has been released, so we have “Precise” packages
• There are now BSD 9 and Mac OS X 10.5 binaries as well

Many new ways to get and use MariaDB,

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

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

If you happen to be using Arch Linux, you can now use MariaDB as it comes with it. Currently shipping 5.3.1 beta, it will be upgraded to the latest release soon. Find out how to get it installed.

A big week for conferences in Europe this week. We’re starting it off at Percona Live London 2011 (see previous post), with both Sergei Golubchik and Colin Charles presenting talks on Tuesday 25 October 2011.

Right after, we’re headed to LinuxCon Europe, where Colin Charles will discuss The MySQL Diaspora and how there exists much choice for people today (it is not just stock MySQL one can use nowadays).

Monty Program is sponsoring both Percona Live London as well as LinuxCon Europe. We’ll be having a booth at LinuxCon Europe, probably right next to our friends SkySQL, as we did at LinuxCon North America (Vancouver).

Its good to announce that Monty Program will have a presence at Percona Live London (October 24 & 25 2011), and we’re very excited about it. There will be two talks (no tutorials this time around):

Will we see you there? Registrations are still open and we would love to talk to you then.

Monty Program

It has arrived, a little over a month from the last beta release, is MariaDB 5.3.1. It is a bug-fix update and as always the changelog lists everything that has been fixed. The release notes list all the changes present in the 5.3-series.

Many fixes are in the optimizer updates that showed itself in MariaDB 5.3.0-beta, plus backports from the MySQL 5.6 feature preview trees. Microsoft Windows is also important to the MariaDB project so there are plenty of updates for that platform. What are you waiting for, download it now.

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

Monty blogged about MariaDB 5.3 being released as a beta with 5.3.0. We also have a press release. Download it now and test the beta!

The MariaDB Project today announced the availability of MariaDB 5.3.0 Beta. It includes a large number of features and additions while still remaining backwards compatible to MySQL®.

“There are many optimizer changes which makes this a very interesting release, because people will notice that their queries run faster,” said Rasmus Johansson, COO of Monty Program Ab, a commercial backer of MariaDB. “The optimizer developers say it’s the biggest change to the

If you’re on openSUSE, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest MariaDB release made on 19/07/2011. Previous security fix disabled XtraDB! This is MariaDB 5.1.55.

If you’re using Gentoo, please test MariaDB 5.2 ebuilds in the MySQL overlay. Its current with MariaDB 5.2.7 as well as MariaDB 5.1.55.

The MariaDB Project is at OSCON 2011. We’ve got a booth, and we plan to also have a BoF session: Wednesday 27 July 2011 at room E142 at 8pm.

There will as usual be lots of black vodka (there was some yesterday at the MySQL BoF as well), and we’re going to talk about and celebrate the release of MariaDB 5.3.0 beta.

Come drop by the booth… we clearly have an interesting booth giveaway. And feel free to say hi to Kurt von Finck, Michael “Monty” Widenius, or Colin Charles who will be present, walking around, etc. Spot them in a MariaDB t-shirt of course!