Ben Forta, the author of MySQL Crash Course and Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, has written what I believe is the first MariaDB-specific book: MariaDB Crash Course. I just received word from Ben that the book is now shipping.

Most MySQL books can, of course, be used to learn almost everything you need to know about using MariaDB. But with all of the features and abilities MariaDB has gained in the MariaDB 5.2 and MariaDB 5.3 releases, it’s nice there is now a book specific to MariaDB.

You don’t need to know anything about MariaDB

Quick pointer that MariaDB 5.2.7 is now released. Highlights from the release notes: RHEL 5 RPMs (in addition to the CentOS 5 RPMs), and the inclusion of the HeidiSQL GUI client for the Windows MSI package. As always, the complete changelog, and what are you waiting for – download it now and give it a try!

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.2, a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes and many community patches, has been released. It has all changes up to MySQL 5.1.51.

For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.2.3, please see the release notes (5.2.2, 5.2.1, and 5.2.0 also).

MariaDB 5.2 includes a number of user enhancements including:

• Improved user statistics which help

Recently I tested our new segmented key cache feature for MyISAM in MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma for performance gains. You can check our new features in MariaDB 5.2 in our Ask Monty Knowledge Base

• What is in MariaDB 5.2

You will also find the details about the segmented key cache feature in our Knowledge Base at:

• Segmented key cache for MyISAM

We wrote a test in LUA for SysBench v0.5 called select_random_points.lua, to figure out the performance gain of splitting the key cache’s global mutex into several mutex under multi user load.

You can find all the details about the benchmark in our Knowledge Base article here: