When I published the MariaDB-5.3.4 sysbench results I said “if your workload includes complex (sub)queries, then you will probably benefit more from MariaDBs new optimizer features”. Today I will present some benchmark results for complex workload.

The benchmark is DBT3, an implementation of the TPC-H specification. DBT3 is written in C and hosted at Sourceforge.

The DBT3 benchmark can run at different scale factors – defining the size of the database. I used a scale factor of 30 which yields ~30GB of raw data and ~48GB of disk footprint. The machine running the benchmark had 16G of memory.

InnoDB has the problem of fluctuating table statistics, leading to rather unpredictable query plans. For this reason the benchmark tables were created with the …

A screencast demonstrating the MariaDB Windows installer.

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links:

• The MariaDB homepage
• The AskMonty Knowledgebase
• The MariaDB Downloads page
• Installing MariaDB on Windows documentation
• The HeidiSQL homepage

Acknowledgments:

A big thanks to Vladislav Vaintroub, MariaDB’s Windows guru, and to Rasmus Johansson for help with the screencast.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.21-beta. MariaDB 5.5.21 is the first Beta release in the 5.5 series and follows the initial MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha release. We hope to follow it up soon with Release Candiate and then Stable (GA) 5.5 releases.

MariaDB 5.5.21 beta is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. In this release we have added some extra notable features including an improved thread pool, an updated SphinxSE storage engine for fulltext search, and the ability to selectively skip replication of binlog events. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into subsequent releases.

As with any beta release, MariaDB 5.5.21-beta should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some …

News:
Oracle will be at DrupalCon in Denver, CO from Monday, March 19th through Friday, March 23rd.

Percona's XtraDB cluster announcement
XtraDB Cluster at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup on Wednesday, March 21st
XtraDB Webinar on Wednesday April 4th

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Here’s another MariaDB screencast, this time highlighting some of the GIS functionality in MariaDB.

(I recommend watching it in full screen 720p, so you can see the details.)

Some links and notes:

• GIS Functionality in MariaDB
• Data used in this screencast
• OpenJUMP
• JUMP database plugin
  • To use the database plugin, unpack it into the OpenJUMP lib/ext/ directory (not a subdirectory, but directly into that directory). Also place the mysql-connector-java.jar into the …

Following closely on the heels of the MariaDB 5.3.4-rc release a couple of weeks ago, the MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.5!

MariaDB 5.3.5 is the first stable (GA) release in the 5.3 series. Details and downloads are available from the following links:

• MariaDB 5.3.5 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.3.5 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.3.5 Downloads

(Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. A sources.list generator is available.)

About MariaDB 5.3

…

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases.

As with any alpha release, MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a  …

News/Feedback:
This week we have some fun audio feedback from Patrick Hurley, a MySQL DBA in the UK.

The Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th. The conference is at the Santa Clara, CA Convention Center. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012. Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!. Check out the tutorial and session schedule.

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Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:

Some notes:

• The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
• As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user. I choose to do it in the video, but you don’t need to. If you leave the password field blank the root password will not be changed. Other database users are preserved, of course.
• As with any database upgrade, before doing this to a production system you should have backups and test.

Links:

Links shown or mentioned in the video:

• …

The MySQL community has something new on their radar. First up, it looks like MySQL is now part of Oracle Software Security Assurance, and this is something all MySQL users should be happy about. Next, it is worth noting that MySQL is now part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (Oracle CPU), as the MySQL product line has made it into its first Oracle CPU advisory for January 2012.

As part of the MySQL community, CPU’s are new to us — they are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October. This kind of reminds us of Patch Tuesday, but let’s not digress.

This is the first time MySQL is part of the Critical Patch Update, and the …