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MySQL and DuckDB

Unlike row-oriented databases, which store data for a single record sequentially on disk, favoring single-row lookups, columnar databases store all the values from a column contiguously in storage, allowing only the selected column to be read from disk.

The default MySQL engine is InnoDB, which is ACID-compliant and great for OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) workloads. That said, OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) queries are built differently; they scan, group, and summarize millions or billions of rows to produce reports. In these cases, the InnoDB engine can be slow to process such queries. This has been a debt in MySQL over the years; it was common to setup ETL/CDC pipelines to export or stream the data to another engine, usually a columnar database system, to run reporting and BI queries on it.

DuckDB is a portable analytical database system, designed to be fast and reliable, similar to SQLite. …

Welcome back to Village News, our curated roundup of MySQL and database news. This week, AWS contributed a fix for large-transaction binlog stalls to community MySQL, and MariaDB launched Enterprise Platform 2027.

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MySQL News

Note: Aggregated MySQL news can be found at Planet for MySQL Community and Planet MySQL (Oracle curated)

AWS contributes a large-transaction binary log optimization to MySQL
AWS Database Blog

TL;DR …

Jonathan shares how he discovered MySQL through building websites and WordPress, his experience at the EU Summit for the MySQL Community, and the challenges of balancing backwards compatibility with modern MySQL features.

MySQL's null-safe equality operator helps you write SQL queries that correctly match NULL values and retrieve records that ordinary equality comparisons miss. See how to filter assigned and unassigned support tickets using null-safe comparisons, and explore the operator's syntax and behavior in the MySQL Reference Manual: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.7/...

Learn how the MySQL null-safe equality operator handles NULL values in SQL queries and helps retrieve records that standard equality comparisons can miss. This demo explains the difference between ordinary equality (=) and null-safe equality, showing how each operator evaluates NULL values and affects query results.

When MySQL commits a large transaction carrying gigabytes of changes, writing it to the binary log (binlog) can freeze every other commit on the server for minutes. This includes transactions that touch unrelated data. This bottleneck is detrimental to applications that depend on low commit latency. On October 29, 2026, AWS shipped an optimization into community MySQL that removes this bottleneck. We call it Binary Log Optimization for Large Transactions (BOLT). It has been available in Amazon Aurora MySQL since v1.22.0 and in all currently supported major versions (Aurora MySQL 2.x, 3.x, and 8.4.x), where it’s always on for every customer. BOLT is planned to be released as part of a future MySQL innovation release.

BOLT provides three benefits. It makes binlog commit latency for large transactions independent of transaction size, it speeds up binlog crash recovery, and it improves throughput for workloads that mix small and large …

Vinicius shares how he got started with MySQL, the community members who inspire him, and his enthusiasm for performance troubleshooting, community events, and AI.

One ecosystem, many projects, shared challenges. Join us in Brussels on Sunday, January 31, 2027, for the M-Ecosystem Devroom at FOSDEM!

Building on the tradition of the MariaDB, MySQL & Friends Devroom, this new chapter expands its scope and ambition, bringing together developers and contributors from across the open-source database ecosystem to share knowledge, tackle common challenges, and foster collaboration across projects.

I shared a meme on LinkedIn because it made me laugh. Then I kept looking at the constraint name at the bottom.

PK__LAW__3214EC07B14E510A.

I would like to cooperate, officer, but I may need a minute to figure out what I did.

PK gives me a clue that this is a primary key constraint. LAW suggests the table involved. The rest gives me something to copy into a search box. A name such as pk_law_id would give me a much better starting point for understanding the violation.

That is a lot to ask of a meme, but it gets at something I care about when I build databases and write code: names should help the person reading them understand what is happening.

A recent post on the MariaDB Foundation Blog has the impressive title How MariaDB 11.8 became about 3× faster on some in-memory workloads, fixing a regression dating back to 10.5.  The claim is technically correct when viewed in isolation, but I believe it becomes misleading when the broader context is taken into account.  The details are below.

The post mentions a benchmark on 11.8

When a commercial entity says they are working on an open source database, community members fairly ask what that means to them. They also ask if the same rules apply to everyone or just the company’s employees. Can an outsider see what's planned? Does a pull request from a stranger go through the same process as one from an employee? This blog post explores how VillageSQL approaches open source by stepping through how we are operating the VillageSQL Server project. VillageSQL Server is the open source tracking fork of MySQL that adds an extension framework to enable permissionless innovation on MySQL. 

GPLv2, inherited from MySQL

VillageSQL Server is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), because that is how upstream MySQL is licensed and VillageSQL inherits that due to the copy left nature of GPLv2. The …