I’m headed to Lisbon, Portugal for the week of March 7-15. Were have a MariaDB Developer Meeting there, hosted by Monty Program. We’re still getting people stating that they are coming (which is good), so if you’re local to the area, and dig MySQL/MariaDB/databases/opensource, drop by and say hi (March 11-13 is when the meeting happens at the Holiday Inn Lisbon).

I’m stoked since I’ve never been to Lisbon, so I’m going a few days earlier to check the place out. If you’ve been before, I’d appreciate tips on what to see, what to do, what I must not miss, etc. I think I’ll actually bring my camera this time around too!

Related posts:

1. Where is MariaDB today?
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This is the final part in a series of posts about the MepSQL build system known as MepSQL Bakery. MepSQL is a (yet another) fork of the MySQL database server, with the server based on the MySQLatFacebook code and the build system based on the MariaDB build system.

In this final post I wish to draw a high level picture of the complete process of building TAR, DEB and (eventually) RPM packages from the source code. There's not much more technical details to add to the previous posts, instead I'm going to make some, shall we say "archeological", observations which imho are interesting given how the build system has evolved when being passed from one project to another. Perhaps more importantly, I will …

Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. Or you can jump into the #maria channel on Freenode …

Trying a new format… Are you subscribed to the announce mailing list? The following is straight from the archives.

Highlights:

• Release of MariaDB 5.1.55
• Meeting in Lisbon
• Call for volunteers for booth duty

Events:

• DrupalCon Chicago
• Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco

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MariaDB 5.1.55 Released

Dear MariaDB users,

The development team have been busy and are ready to release MariaDB 5.1.55. MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes and …

Yesterday I wrote down the approach used in the MepSQL build system to parameterize the TAR package name produced. Today I will follow up with how the same was done for building DEBs. The motivation is to create a system that can be used flexibly to create packages of any MySQL fork, with any brand name: mepsql-server-*.deb, percona-server-server-*.deb, mariadb-server-*.deb or even just mysql-server-*.deb (which I might do some day).

While yesterday's tricks with the TAR files were rather straightforward, with the process of building DEBs this turns out to be much more challenging. But not to worry, like my former collague Bernhard Ocklin used to say: This is software, anything …

As I mentioned before, it seems that thanks to Git and Bzr introducing distributed version control workflows, the open source community is now living in a phase where forking is easy and happens frequently - referred to by Brian Aker as the Cambrian Explosion of open source. We certainly see that happening in the MySQL Community.

Assuming you have the competence and know your way around a codebase, forking a proper open source project isn't that hard. You create your own project on GitHub or Launchpad and copy the source code. 1 But one …

This is the third post in a series about developing the MepSQL build system. In the previous posts we chose BuildBot running in the Amazon EC2 cloud. In this post we actually get a closer look at how the packages are being built (to be followed by even closer looks in later posts :-)

One of the things missing when you fork MySQL is the build system. (The other main missing component being the manual.) It is possible for anyone to compile MySQL from source, but the actual build system (scripts, testing, etc) used by MySQL itself is not public. The same is true for the automated testing. MariaDB uses the open source tool called …

Again this year, I will be speaking about MariaDB and stuff at the OpenSourceDays2011 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference will take place on Saturday March 5, that's just over a week from now! The program is ready and my talk is scheduled for the afternoon at 15:30. Hope to meet a lot of people there!

(I will be sure to make the slides from my talk available here afterwards, for those of you interested but unable to attend.)

Here is the abstract for my talk:

Latest news from the MariaDB (and MySQL) community

A lot of Open Source software projects got transfered to Oracle last year as part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Not everybody in the affected Open Source communities have been happy with this transfer, to put it mildly, and projects like LibreOffice, Illumos, …

I am pleased to announce the availability of the MariaDB 5.2 feature preview release. Find the details and download links on the knowledgebase.

There has been quite good interest in the replication work I have been doing around MariaDB, and I wanted a way to make it easy for people to use, experiment with, and give feedback on the new features. The result is this replication feature preview release. This will all eventually make it into the next official release, however this is likely still some month off.

All the usual binary packages and source tarballs are available for download. As something new, I now also made apt-enabled repositories available for Debian and Ubuntu; this should greatly simplify installation on these .deb based …

This is the second part in a series of posts about how the MepSQL packages were built. In part 1 I evaluated OpenSuse Build System and Launchpad PPA and ended up concluding that running your own BuildBot system is the best choice, as those public services didn't provide any facility to test their packages.

This brings us to the next topic: As I don't possess any servers, should I buy one (or more) or should I try out the cloud services? If yes, should I use Amazon EC2 or something else?

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