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 bigger tables and bigger queries. This requires query plans to …

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 or MySQL in order to get the most …

My colleagues and I are looking for extra talent – is that you?

What we do:help clients prevent problems (rather than being the fire department), we work on a subscription basis although we also do some ad-hoc consulting, and training. Apart from MySQL/MariaDB query and DBA work, we do quite a bit of system administration. Mainly Red Hat and Debian based distros, and expect to see replication and the MySQL-MMM multi-master system. You’d work from home, whereever it might be, so you will need to be self-motivating (but we do keep in touch online).

What we’re not: a full-time employer. With us, you make a life rather than a living. Everybody is contracted part-time. You can make enough to live comfortably, but that has nothing to do with hours. If you’re stressed about not filling all hours in your week with work-work-work, we’re not the company for you… there’s more to life than …

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.

Multi-master database systems that span sites are an increasingly common requirement in business applications.  Yet the way such applications work in practice is not quite what you would think from accounts of NoSQL systems like Cassandra or SQL-based systems like Oracle RAC.  In this article I would like to introduce a versatile design pattern for multi-master SQL applications in which individual schemas are updated in a single location only but may have many copies elsewhere both locally as well as on other sites.  This pattern is known as a system of record architecture.  You can build it with off-the-shelf MySQL and master/slave replication.

Let's …

Last week Percona announced plans to sponsor the Percona MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in April 2012.  It is meant to replace the O'Reilly conferences of previous years.  The announcement led to some reasonable questions, for example from Giuseppe Maxia.  These and other online posts initiated a thoughtful exchange of views about the pros and cons of Percona's conference announcement by various members of the MySQL community.

Not everyone …

XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …

I am happy to announce that the first MariaDB book is released!

The book is called MariaDB Crash Course and is written by Ben Forta, who also wrote the MySQL Crash Course book.

Quoting the book description:

"This book will teach you all you need to know to be immediately productive with MySQL. By working through 30 highly focused hands-on lessons, your MySQL Crash Course will be both easier and more effective than you'd have thought possible"

This is great news for new users to SQL and to MariaDB as it makes it easier for them to get things going quickly!

You can find a link to this book and other recommended MariaDB / MySQL books …

About Jelastic:

Jelastic is the next generation of Java Platforms as a Service.

Unlike previous cloud platforms, Jelastic:

• Can run any Java application and so does not require developers to change their code or get locked-into the platform,
• Can scale any application up and down by automatically adding or removing memory and CPU units depending on the application load,
• Takes all configuration and management worries away: developers simply specify the application stack and database options they need and Jelastic creates, configures, and maintains the environment for them
• Supports a wide range of application server stacks including Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, and GlassFish
• Out of the box, allows users to get a preconfigured instance of MariaDB up and running and available to the application.

A beta version …

Exciting news – MariaDB gets its first book!

Many years ago I read Ben Forta’s MySQL Crash Course . It is a book targeted at beginners of MySQL. Ben has now written another book, titled: MariaDB Crash Course.

Its still targeted at beginners, and covers many of the new features that are available in MariaDB up to version 5.2. I had the pleasure of pre-reading it, and did send in lots of comments to Ben, and if implemented we’ll see some stuff in there that is current even for MariaDB 5.3, like dynamic columns and …